I’ve been rather ignorant of this discipline, and only saw categorization of historical style progressions as a taxonomic exercise. Over the years as I listened to classical music, I’ve gained at least one understanding of why there is a progression — something rooted in human expectation and its motivic innovation, I suppose (some fascinating papers on the subject of aesthetics here and here). But why this particular progression was never clear. Perhaps there was no rhyme or reason, I thought, just a coincidence.

So lately I’ve been considering whether there is some organization to better understand some milestones of (Western) art history, which get period labels like:

premodern, classicist, medieval, renaissance, baroque, rationalist, romantic, modern, and postmodern.
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Following up on a side note from this post, it is possible to construct continuous changes from one chord to the other by linear interpolation of their frequency envelopes (i.e., chord interpolation).

Here is an example in Mathematica.

A[f_] := Sin[2*Pi*t*f*220];

For example, one of the major triads is 4:5:6, and the harmonic minor triad is 6:7:9.

First, the two chords:

Play[{A[1260/1260] + A[1575/1260] + A[1890/1260]}, {t, 0, 1}]

Play[{A[1260/1260] + A[1470/1260] + A[1890/1260]}, {t, 0, 1}]

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