Gabriele Cecchetti | EPFL Graph Search

After being awarded an MPhil at the Centre for Music and Science (University of Cambridge), Gabriele Cecchetti joined the Digital and Cognitive Musicology Lab (EPFL) as a doctoral assistant in 2019. In Rome, his hometown, he previously graduated in physics (Università ‘La Sapienza’) and as a cellist (Conservatorio ‘S. Cecilia’). His research interests lie on a spectrum spanning from music analysis and performance to the mathematical and theoretical modelling of the cognitive underpinnings of the experience of music. For his master’s project, he focused on a small-scale information-theoretic model of tonal affinity based on psychoacoustic and neuroscientific insight. Within the ERC-funded project ‘Principles of Musical Structure Building’ he will engage with matching theoretical and computational approaches with empirical cognitive and psychological frameworks. He is also an experienced musician with a particular devotion to chamber music, and has been extensively involved in music teaching over several years of collaboration with the educational programs of the National Academy ‘S. Cecilia’ in Rome.

The diachronic development of Debussy’s musical style: a corpus study with Discrete Fourier Transform

Gabriele Cecchetti, Johannes Hentschel, Sabrina Laneve, Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Ludovica Schaerf

Claude Debussy’s personal style is typically characterised as a departure from earlier diatonic tonality, including a greater variety of pitch-class materials organised in fragmented yet coherent compositions. Exploiting the music-theoretical interpretability of Discrete Fourier Transforms over pitch-class distributions, we performed a corpus study over Debussy’s solo- piano works in order to investigate the diachronic development of such stylistic features across the composer’s lifespan. We propose quantitative heuristics for the prevalence of different pitch-class prototypes, the fragmentation of a piece across different prototypes, as well as some aspect of the overall coherence of a piece. We found strong evidence for a decrease of diatonicity in favour of octatonicity, as well as for an increase of fragmentation accompanied by non-decreasing coherence. These results contribute to the understanding of the historical development of extended-tonal harmony, while representing a fertile testing ground for the interaction of computational corpus-based methods with traditional music analytical approaches.

2023

Hearing functional harmony in jazz: A perceptual study on music-theoretical accounts of extended tonality

Gabriele Cecchetti, Christoph Finkensiep, Daniel Harasim, Steffen Alexander Herff, Martin Alois Rohrmeier

Functional harmony is an integral part of many repertoires in the Western musical practices, including both diatonic and extended tonality. In the latter context, music-theoretical accounts suggest that the three octatonic equivalence classes (OECs) consisting of pitch-classes related by stacked minor-third intervals may be associated with tonic (T), dominant (D), and subdominant (S) functions. Whether this theoretical description of music is also relevant to the perception of music has not yet been tested empirically. In this study, 100 participants familiar with Western repertoires were presented with jazz chord progressions containing chord substitutions. When each stimulus had been played, participants predicted how many more chords they would have expected to hear before the progression could reach a plausible conclusion. We computed the similarity of responses for pairs of stimuli containing different harmonic substitutions and modeled such similarity values based on different measures of harmonic relatedness between substitutions. Data show that the OEC membership of substitutions strongly predicts the similarity of participants' completion ratings. Bayesian mixed-effects modeling of similarity values further showed a categorical distinction between D and S as functional categories, on one hand, and T, on the other hand. The data also appear to reflect the prevalent influence of rock and pop repertoires on the participants, encouraging further research into the influence of stylistic diversity and musical expertise. Overall, results contribute to the characterization of listeners' implicit knowledge of the principles of harmonic structure in extended tonality and support the relevance of OECs not only as descriptors of extended-tonal compositional practices but also parsimonious predictors of perceived functionality.

SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD2022

Musical Garden Paths: Evidence for Syntactic Revision Beyond the Linguistic Domain

Gabriele Cecchetti, Steffen Alexander Herff, Martin Alois Rohrmeier

While theoretical and empirical insights suggest that the capacity to represent and process complex syntax is crucial in language as well as other domains, it is still unclear whether specific parsing mechanisms are also shared across domains. Focusing on the musical domain, we developed a novel behavioral paradigm to investigate whether a phenomenon of syntactic revision occurs in the processing of tonal melodies under analogous conditions as in language. We present the first proof-of-existence for syntactic revision in a set of tonally ambiguous melodies, supporting the relevance of syntactic representations and parsing with language-like characteristics in a nonlinguistic domain. Furthermore, we find no evidence for a modulatory effect of musical training, suggesting that a general cognitive capacity, rather than explicit knowledge and strategies, may underlie the observed phenomenon in music.

Wiley2022

Hearing functional harmony in jazz: A perceptual study on music-theoretical accounts of extended tonality

Gabriele Cecchetti, Christoph Finkensiep, Daniel Harasim, Steffen Alexander Herff, Martin Alois Rohrmeier

SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD2022