Publications | Jason Yust

My writings deal with the intersection of mathematics with a variety of topics in music theory and analysis, such as rhythm, harmony, musical structure, and form. The lists below link to preprint pdfs available through OpenBU or this website, or journal websites in the case of open access publications.

Articles

Book Chapters and Proceedings Articles

Other writings

Conference Papers and Lectures

2023: “Windows into Musical Time” (powerpoint), Música Analítica: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Musical Time.
2023: “Rhythmic Regularity beyond Meter and Isochrony” (powerpoint)(pdf), Keynote presentation to the Rhythm in Music since 1900 conference at McGill University, Sept 22–24, 2023. (Note: Powerpoint is a large download. The pdf lacks embedded video and sound and notes but is much smaller.)
2022: “Non-Spectral Transposition-Invariant Information in Pitch-Class Sets and Distributions” with Emmanuel Amiot, Eighth International Conference for Mathematics and Computation in Music.
2022: “Tetrachordal Folding Operations,” Eighth International Conference for Mathematics and Computation in Music.
2022: “Tetrachordal Folding Operations,”Conference in Honor of Jonathan Bernard, Seattle.
2022: “Identifying Metric Types with Optimized DFT and Autocorrelation Models” with Matthew Chiu, Eighth International Conference for Mathematics and Computation in Music.
2021: “Flexibly Defined Tuning Systems Using Continuous Fourier Transforms,” Mathematical and Computational Models in Music Workshop, University of Pavia.
2021: “Harmonic Qualities as Key to Scriabin’s Late Harmonic Practice” with Thomas Noll, Tenth European Music Analysis Conference (Euromac).
2021: “The Multileveled Rhythmic Structure of Ragtime” with Phillip Kirlin, Human-Computer Interaction International Conference.
2021: “Serial Analysis: A Digital Library of Rows in the Repertoire and their Properties, with Applications for Teaching and Research” with Mark Gotham, Digital Libraries for Musicology.
2020: “Materials of Tonality: Harmonic Spectra and Phase Spaces for Classical Music, Blues, and Jazz,” Northwestern University University Music Theory and Cognition Colloquium.
2020: “Sailing off the Edge of Tonality: Debussy and Scriabin’s Harmonic Adventurism Explained with Harmonic Spectra and Tonal Spaces,” Louisiana State University Music Forum.
2020: “Tonality, Fuzzy Voice Leading, and All that Jazz,” Eastman Music Theory Colloquium.
2020: “Dimensions of Atonality,” Ohio State University Music Cognition Seminar.
2020: “Fourier Methods for Computational Analysis of Enharmonicism and Other Harmonic Properties,” Journées d’Informatique Musicale.
2019: “Rhythmic Qualities, Meter, and Reich’s Cyclic Canons,” Society for Music Theory.
2019: “Hypermeter and Form as Temporal Structure, and Beethoven’s Formal Innovations” McGill Doctoral Research Colloquium.
2019: “Fourier Phase and Pitch-Class Sum” with Dmitri Tymoczko, Seventh International Conference for Mathematics and Computation in Music.
2019: “Decontextualizing Contextual Inversion,” Seventh International Conference for Mathematics and Computation in Music. This presentation included an Animated Analysis of my Composition “Not Marble.”
2019: “Rhythmic Qualities, Meter, and Reich’s Cyclic Canons,” New England Conference of Music Theorists.
2019: “Getting Stylistic Information from Pitch-Class Distributions Using the DFT,” Northeast Music Cognition Group.
2017: “Generalized Trichordal and Tetrachordal Tonnetze: Geometry and Analytical Applications” Society for Music Theory.
2017: “Michael Haydn, Mozart, and the Invention of Sonata-Rondo” Music Theory Society of New York State.
2017: “Harmony from Tonal to Atonal through Fourier Phase Space“ University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Research in Music Lecture Series.
2017: “Geometrical Realizations of Two- and Three-Dimensional Generalized Tonnetze“ American Mathematical Society Special Session on Mathematical Music Theory.
2017: “Probing Questions about Keys: Tonal Distributions through the DFT,” Sixth International Conference for Mathematics and Computation in Music.
2017: “Generalized Trichordal and Tetrachordal Tonnetze: Geometry and Analytical Applications” New England Conference of Music Theorists.
2016: “Hypermeter, Form, and Closure in Haydn’s and Beethoven’s Codas,” Sixth International New Beethoven Research Conference.
2016: “A Three-Dimensional Model of Tonality” American Mathematical Society Special Session on Mathematical Music Theory.
2015: “Mathematical Approached to Scale Degrees and Harmonic Functions in Analytical Dialogue” with Thomas Noll and Karst de Jong, Society for Music Theory.
2015: “A Spatial Perspective on Voice Leading and Beethoven’s Heiliger Dankgesang,” University of Connecticut Music Theory / Music History Colloquium.
2015: “The Fourier Transform and a Theory of Harmony for the Twentieth Century,” Society for Music Theory.
2015: “Applications of DFT to the Theory of Twentieth Century Harmony,” Fifth International Conference for Mathematics and Computation in Music.
2015: “Analysis of Twentieth Century Harmony Using the Fourier Transform,” Music Theory Society of New York State.
2015: “Analysis of Analysis: Importance of Different Musical Parameters for Schenkerian Analysis” with Phillip Kirlin, 8th International Workshop for Music and Machine Learning.
2014: “Restoring the Structural Status of Keys through DFT Phase Space,” International Congress on Music and Mathematics.
2013: “Schubert’s Harmonic Language and the Tonnetz as a Continuous Geometry,” Society for Music Theory.
2013: “Schubert’s Harmonic Language and the Tonnetz as a Continuous Geometry,” Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic.
2012: “Expressive Text Setting in Partch’s Early Vocal Music, and the Harmonic and Voice-Leading Resources of Extended Just Intonation,” The Harry Partch Legacy Symposium.
2012: “Testing Schenkerian Theory: An Experiment in the Perception of Key Distances,” International Conference for Music Perception and Cognition.
2012: “Voice-Leading Geometry, Maximal Evenness, and Acoustic-Scale Harmony in Ravel’s Ondine,” John Clough Memorial Conference.
2012: “C.P.E. Bach’s Symphonies and the Composer-Specific Study of Form,” Music Theory Society of New York State.
2011: “Storm and Stress, Form and Process: Compositional Strategies in Haydn’s and C.P.E. Bach’s Symphonies of the Early 1770s,” Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic.
2011: “Storm and Stress, Form and Process: Compositional Strategies in Haydn’s and C.P.E. Bach’s Symphonies of the Early 1770s,” Music Theory Southeast and the South Central Society for Music Theory
2011: “Mathematics of Contrapuntal Hierarchy in Music,” Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic American Mathematical Society Special Session on Mathematical Techniques in Music Analysis.
2010: “Upright Petrouchka, Proper Scales, and Sideways Neapolitans” with Rachel Hall and Dmitri Tymoczko, Society for Music Theory..
2010: “Diatonic Categorization in the Perception of Melodies,” International Conference for Music Perception and Cognition.
2010: “Scalar Transposition, Fractional Pitch-Classes, and Harmonic Sequences,” New England Conference of Music Theorists.
2010: “Problems of Contrapuntal Representation in Schenkerian Theory,” Music Theory Society of New York State.
2010: “Scalar Transposition, Fractional Pitch-Classes, and Harmonic Sequences,” Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic..
2009: “The Geometry of Melodic, Harmonic, and Metrical Hierarchy,” Second International Conference for Mathematics and Computation in Music.
2009: “Counterpoint and Sequence in Schenkerian Theory,” Canadian University Music Society.
2008: “Methods of Large-Scale Rhythmic and Tonal Organization as Stylistic Features of Haydn’s Keyboard Sonatas,” Joint Conference for the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music and the Haydn Society of North America.
2008: “Large-Scale Rhythmic Organization in the Music of Haydn,” West Coast Conference of Music Theory and Analysis.
2007: “The Step-Class Automorphism Group in Tonal Analysis,” First International Conference for Mathematics and Computation in Music.

Recent:

My recent essay, “Tonality and Racism” has been published in the Journal of Music Theory vol. 68 no. 1, along with responses by Philip Ewell, Thomas Christensen, Steven Rings, Nicole Biamonte, Dmitri Tymoczko, Psyche Loui, Megan Long, Susan McClary, and Liam Hynes-Tawa.

I presented “Coherence of Harmonic and Rhythmic Qualities” (powerpoint) at the Mathematical Encounters in Singapore conference on 2/19/2024.

I did a Zoom colloquium talk for the Society for Music Analysis on Dec. 6, 2023, 18:30 GMT/1:30pm EST entitled “Periodicity and Continuity in Pitch and Time.” Here is the powerpoint (warning: large file!) and a (smaller) pdf.

I presented “Windows into Musical Time” at the Interdisciplinary Approaches to Musical Time conference (Música Analitica, 2nd International Conference), showing how the paradigm of windowed analysis can lead to a way of understanding the concept of “vertical time.”

My recent essay, “Tonality and Racism” will be published soon by the Journal of Music Theory along with 10 responses to the essay by leading thinkers in music theory.

I gave a keynote presentation for the Rhythm in Music Since 1900, Sept. 22–24, 2023, on Sat Sept. 23, 11:00–12:15. The title of my talk was “Rhythmic Regularity beyond Meter and Isochrony.” Here is my powerpoint (which is large due to embedded video and audio) and for an easier download, a pdf version.

At the Analytical Approaches to World Music Special Topics Symposium (June 1–8, 2023), I presented on the panel discussion, “Stephen Blum’s Music Theory in Ethnomusicology: A Book Dialogue,” chaired by Michael Tenzer. My comments are here: Music theory nationalized or internationalized: reflections on global music theory occasioned by Stephen Blum’s Music Theory in Ethnomusicology.

A recent issue of the Journal of Mathematics and Music (Vol. 16, no. 3, Fall 2022) is a tribute to Jack Douthett, which I edited.

In 2022, I edited a special issue of the Journal of Mathematics and Music (16/2) on the Mathematics of Rhythm in honor of Godfried Toussiant, with Chris White and Leigh Van Handel, which can be found here.

I recently published an article that proposes a data-driven approach to identifying harmonies in music with Jaesong Lee and Eugene Pinsky, “A Clustering-Based Approach to Automatic Harmonic Analysis: An Exploratory Study of Harmony and Form in Mozart’s Piano Sonatas” Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval 5/1.

At the meeting of the American Brahms Society, Brahms 2022: New Paths, New Persepctives in New Orleans, Nov. 9–10, I presented on a themed session organized by Richard Cohn, entitled Brahms’s Hybrid Metric Dissonances, 1:30–3:00 on Weds. 11/9. My paper, “Multivalent Displaced Hemiolas in Brahms’s Late Songs” analyzes three songs from Op. 94 and Op. 106 and introduces a visualization of metrical displacement and hemiola I call the “metric cyclone.”

At the Joint Meeting of the American Musicological Society, Society for Music Theory, and Society for Ethnomusicology, I presented a poster on the SMT poster session from 8–10 AM on Friday Nov. 11. My poster, “Interacting Periodicities in the Music of Ligeti and The Bad Plus” shows how rhythmic spectra can reveal implicit periodicities in “funky” rhythms that can interact, similar in certain ways to polyrhythms, but with a different effect. I draw examples from the later music of modernist composer György Ligeti and the members of the boundary-pushing jazz trio The Bad Plus (Reid Anderson and Dave King) form the early 2000s.

Also at this meeting, I gave a talk for the Mathematics of Music Interest Group of the SMT on Friday, Nov. 11, 12:30–2:00 PM on the mathematical portions of my 2018 book, Organized Time: Rhythm, Tonality, and Form. I focused on Chs. 4, 13, and 14, which introduce properties of structural networks, some graph theory for structural networks, and the idea of the associahedron as a geometry of structural networks.