Harmonic compatibility for loops in electronic music

In this work, we explore and compare a set of measures for harmonic compatibility. We focus our research on simultaneous harmonic compatibility for Loops in Electronic music. Loops are short and repetitive pieces of music meant to be played infinitely and are very popular in modern music production. The measures evaluated cover di˙erent algorithms and underlying mechanisms for harmonic compatibility. The mechanisms range from spectral matching and roughness to periodicity of the resulting signal. The measures are evaluated in an open experiment where par-ticipants are asked about their preference between pairwise comparisons of mixes suggested by the algorithms. We analyze the results with a statistical model that allows us to go from pairwise comparisons to a global ranking. We provide conclusions for this final global ranking, and also for our own observations of the suggested mixes. A complementary repository for this work is provided, containing the code, scripts, results, and links to the database of Loops.

With this work, we step towards a better understanding of the underlying mech-anisms of harmonic compatibility. Also, the repository containing the code, allow future researchers to reproduce our work and explore the field of harmonic compat-ibility without having to implement the algorithms from scratch.