A Handbook for Analyzing Tonal Organization in Monophonic Music

Subtitle: Multifactorial Modal Analysis of Expressive Uses of Definite and Indefinite Pitch in Vocal and Instrumental Sound-Making.

Abstract: This handbook presents a rule-based method for the systematic identification, classification, and interpretation of tonal organization (TO) in monophonic recordings across the full spectrum of world music—from Western diatonic tonality to the indefinite-pitch (ekmelic and premelic) vocalizations of indigenous Siberian traditions and the earliest spontaneous singing of young children. The method bridges the Russian tradition of intonation-based modal analysis with Western computational audio-feature extraction, combining a rich theoretical vocabulary with the empirical rigor of acoustic measurement. The procedure also provides criteria for deciding whether a given vocal or instrumental sound sequence exhibits enough structured and functionally stabilized sound-class organization to be treated as music rather than as speech, noise, imitation, or animal communication.

The handbook is organized in nine chapters. After establishing a structural definition of music grounded in the concept of culturally stabilized sound-classes, the text surveys existing Russian and Western analytical approaches, examines the emic/etic debate in ethnomusicological analysis, and addresses the limits of standard staff notation for representing non-Western pitch systems. A dedicated chapter on audio-feature extraction outlines practical solutions for spectrogram-based frequency analysis, segmentation into phonemic regions, and the handling of continuous pitch modulation (vibrato, glides, microtonal inflections) characteristic of ekmelic music. Special attention is given to the conversion of acoustic evidence into analytically interpretable musical categories.

The analytical core (Chapter 6) formulates twenty-eight explicit, sequentially applied rules covering melodic articulation, voice-leading, gravitational mapping, and intonational structure. These rules are designed to be etic (applicable without insider knowledge of the analyzed tradition), scalable (applicable from the simplest premelic vocalizations to complex diatonic modes), and partially automatable (suitable as a framework for computational pipelines). Chapter 6 demonstrates the full twenty-eight-rule procedure applied end-to-end to the Yakut folk song ("Sae Dyige") that combines a well-defined anchor and floating unstable degrees in an ekmelic mode.

Chapter 7 puts the method to the test by taking on a borderline case—spontaneous humming of a three-year-old child—one of the most challenging test cases for modal analysis. The method succeeds in identifying two alternating premelic submodes and their intonational makeup. Differences between premelic and ekmelic forms of indefinite pitch are discussed. Frustum projection is proposed to visualize the structure of a musical mode to capture the functional and gravitational characteristics of its constituent degrees. Frustum diagrams provide a convenient way to compare tonal organization of different forms of indefinite pitch using a common visual scale.

The glossary defines key technical terms. An appendix provides a consolidated reference list of all 28 rules. The handbook is accompanied by 52 audio examples and 2 video examples (in the accompanying zip archive), as well as the spectrogram walkthroughs, hosted at YouTube, which allow readers to verify the analytical categories against actual vocal and instrumental samples.

The method is offered as a practical analytical tool for researchers in music information retrieval (MIR), developmental psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, ethnomusicology, cultural anthropology, and animal communication, who require a unified, cross-culturally applicable framework for studying melodic structure beyond the boundaries of Western tonal music.