Understanding Feature Importance in Musical Works: Unpacking Predictive Contributions to Cluster Analyses

Cluster analysis provides insight into musical patterns in composition, performance, and perception. Despite its wide adoption in music research, understanding how specific features affect clustering solutions remains challenging. For example, features such as mode (i.e., major/minor), timing, signal amplitude, and pitch are often intercorrelated, making it difficult to understand their specific role within different clusters. To demonstrate …