> I’m not sure why the author has chosen to represent music as a graph showing the relationship between individual notes.
I think this can easily explainted: You only get notes from the data. Chords, etc are "cultural" constructs: Names for certain sets of relationships between individual notes.
So as you said: We should assume that their technique of analysis should reproduce our notions. For example I would assume that the note transitions primarliy happen inside the key of a piece or that comparing the note transitions between different voices follows certain patterns ("contrapoint"). And it would be interesting to connect their data space to our existing framework.
But that's a lot of additional work that might not be necessary for certain goals: If the goal is to see if their technique is able to answer certain questions (such as differentiating styles of composition), that's already good enough.
My general assumption would be: If their data space or technique of representation is rich enough to reconstruct the original data, it is just as good in terms of what we can answer. The question is then: How convenienty can we answer our questions using their representation.
I'd disagree with your first sentence, which is that the data only contains notes. The original score - the data - also includes note duration, which notes are voiced simultaneously, and a starting and terminal note of the composition. With the model in their paper, all of that information is lost (or ignored.)
That is, I do not believe that your assumption is true, that the original data could be reconstructed from their representation.
I am theoretically open to the idea that perhaps we don't need all of the original information from the score in order to answer certain questions about the music. But I am skeptical that this particular analysis will yield anything fruitful.
I think this can easily explainted: You only get notes from the data. Chords, etc are "cultural" constructs: Names for certain sets of relationships between individual notes.
So as you said: We should assume that their technique of analysis should reproduce our notions. For example I would assume that the note transitions primarliy happen inside the key of a piece or that comparing the note transitions between different voices follows certain patterns ("contrapoint"). And it would be interesting to connect their data space to our existing framework.
But that's a lot of additional work that might not be necessary for certain goals: If the goal is to see if their technique is able to answer certain questions (such as differentiating styles of composition), that's already good enough.
My general assumption would be: If their data space or technique of representation is rich enough to reconstruct the original data, it is just as good in terms of what we can answer. The question is then: How convenienty can we answer our questions using their representation.