Keyfinding:

... What’s it all about?

Key

The key of a piece is an infrafrastructural framework of pitch relations according to which the constituent notes of
the piece make sense. This infrastructure includes a privileged pitch which in some theoretical sense, and perhaps a
practical sense as well, dominates the piece. In fact, this infrastructure imposes a linear order on the theoretical, if
not practical, significance of each pitch for the piece.

Algorithm RS provides a sense of what it means to linearly order pitches according to significance. Recall that,
within the scheme of Algorithm RS, sd(1) > sd(5) > sd(3) > sd(x), where sd a function mapping the degree of a
scale onto a pitch, and x denotes any degree other than 1 or 3 or 5. The point to note here is that a refined sense of
key considers all 12 pitches, not just the big three.

In simple terms, the key of a musical piece is typically considered to be the particular major or minor scale with
which the piece most strongly resonates. This is intuitively what it means for the key of a piece of music to be in a
key corresponding to a scale.

Keyfinding

The keyfinding problem is the problem of determining which of the 12 major and 12 minor scales is the best fit for
a given piece of tonal music, where goodness of fit is determined by maximizing the correlation between the actual
cumulative distribution of pitches heard in a piece of music, the piece pitch profile, or PPP, and an ideal distribution
of pitches, the key pitch profile, or KPP, that represents the key.

Linear ordering of notes by significance

It turns out that the KPP is the same for all major keys, and the same for all minor keys, but differs between major
keys and minor keys.

For major keys, a piece is probably in key K if the PPP is more or less consistent with the following linear ordering
of pitche representation in K: K(1) > K(5) > K(3) > K(4) > K(6) > K(2) > K(7) > K(4-5) > K(5-6) > K(6-7) >
K(2-3) > K(1-2)

For minor keys, a piece is probablyf in key K if the PPP is more or less consistent with this rather different linear
ordering of the pitche representation in K: K(1) > K(2-3) > K(5) > K(4) > K(5-6) > K(2) > K(6-7) > K(7) > K(6)
> K(1-2) > K(3) > K(4-5)

Where did these linear orderings come from? From the lab of Carol Krumhansel, who determine them through
painstaking use of something called the “probe tone technique”. Moreover, Krumhansel/Kessler determined the
KPP for the major keys and the KPP for the minor keys with this technique.