# Automatic Analysis and Influence of Hierarchical Structure on Melody, Rhythm and Harmony in Popular Music

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.07518 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07518/

## Key facts

- Cited by 21 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 15 Oct 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Controllable deep melody generation via hierarchical music structure representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00663/) (2021)
- [Whole-Song Hierarchical Generation of Symbolic Music Using Cascaded Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09901/) (2024)
- [Compose & Embellish: Well-Structured Piano Performance Generation via A Two-Stage Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08212/) (2022)
- [Structure-Enhanced Pop Music Generation via Harmony-Aware Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06441/) (2021)
- [Structured Multi-Track Accompaniment Arrangement via Style Prior Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16334/) (2023)
- [Motifs, Phrases, and Beyond: The Modelling of Structure in Symbolic Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07995/) (2024)
- [Structure-informed Positional Encoding for Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13301/) (2024)
- [Melody Infilling with User-Provided Structural Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02829/) (2022)
- [Personalized Popular Music Generation Using Imitation and Structure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04709/) (2021)
- [BandCondiNet: Parallel Transformers-based Conditional Popular Music Generation with Multi-View Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10462/) (2024)
- [F-StrIPE: Fast Structure-Informed Positional Encoding for Symbolic Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10491/) (2025)
- [Efficient Fine-Grained Guidance for Diffusion Model Based Symbolic Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08435/) (2024)
- [From Generality to Mastery: Composer-Style Symbolic Music Generation via Large-Scale Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17497/) (2025)
- [Learning Hierarchical Metrical Structure Beyond Measures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10259/) (2022)
- [Synthesizing Composite Hierarchical Structure from Symbolic Music Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15849/) (2025)
- [Of All StrIPEs: Investigating Structure-informed Positional Encoding for Efficient Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05364/) (2025)
- [CompLex: Music Theory Lexicon Constructed by Autonomous Agents for Automatic Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19603/) (2025)
- [Barwise Section Boundary Detection in Symbolic Music Using Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16566/) (2025)
- [BACHI: Boundary-Aware Symbolic Chord Recognition Through Masked Iterative Decoding on Pop and Classical Music](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06528/) (2025)
- [D3PIA: A Discrete Denoising Diffusion Model for Piano Accompaniment Generation From Lead sheet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03523/) (2026)
- [Helping Music Co-Creation Agents 'Listen' Well: Hierarchical Self-Supervised World Models for Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.04378/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Repetition is a basic indicator of musical structure. This study introduces new algorithms for identifying musical phrases based on repetition. Phrases combine to form sections yielding a two-level hierarchical structure. Automatically detected hierarchical repetition structures reveal significant interactions between structure and chord progressions, melody and rhythm. Different levels of hierarchy interact differently, providing evidence that structural hierarchy plays an important role in music beyond simple notions of repetition or similarity. Our work suggests new applications for music generation and music evaluation.