Corpus Approaches to Orchestration

Abstract In Western art music, thousands of works have been composed for an orchestra. Despite the wealth of published treatises by composers on the instrument combination techniques, orchestration was regarded as an art of combining instruments that a person could achieve only after years of practice, rather than a system of techniques that can be scientifically studied. Numerous composers have written treatises on orchestration, but discussions of orchestration tend to be idiosyncratic rather than systematic. This chapter surveys research efforts to understand the practice of orchestration from the systematic perspective of corpus analysis. The development of technology, such as reliable automatic optical music recognition and conversion, will improve data collection and allow researchers to discover more meaningful patterns hidden in data, which eventually will illuminate changes through history as well as provide a scientific explanation of principles behind orchestration practices.