Methods for pitch analysis in contemporary popular music: phenomenological analysis of Primaal's commercial works

This article uses phenomenological analysis to examine pitch-related elements in commercial popular music, focussing on Primaal, a successful electronic music brand whose works have been licensed by major international companies. Working in collaboration with the producers, we identify musical parameters related to pitch and document how their treatment differs radically from Western classical music conventions. Central to Primaal's aesthetic is the deliberate cultivation of pitch uncertainty, achieved through multiple techniques: tone inharmonicity, quasi-harmonic tones designed to evoke multiple simultaneous pitches, strategic boosting of upper partials, and continuous frequency trajectories inspired by the Roland TR-808 bass drum. Rather than discrete notes, pitches are distributed around scale degrees (‘poles’), with the distribution width serving as an expressive parameter. The music is organised modally rather than tonally, typically focussing on a few degrees with one functioning as a ‘final’. We show how these pitch-related parameters articulate both large-scale and small-scale musical structure. Signal analysis, supported by psychoacoustic weighting, serves as our transcription method, avoiding the biases inherent in score-based notation. The findings contribute to music analysis, music information retrieval, computational creativity, and psychoacoustics, suggesting that pitch in contemporary popular music often operates as a continuous, multidimensional phenomenon that resists reduction to discrete note representations.