Publications related to Digital and Cognitive Musicology Lab

Data-Driven Music Theory: Curating and Investigating Large Corpora of Digitally Encoded Music Analyses

This dissertation on data-driven music theory is centered around curatorial practices concerning the creation, publication, and evaluation of large, expert-annotated symbolic datasets. With its primary interest in the harmony of European tonal music from i ...

EPFL2024

Computational modeling of interval distributions in tonal space reveals paradigmatic stylistic changes in Western music history

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Fabian Claude Moss, Robert Lieck

Diachronic stylistic changes in music are to a large extent affected by composers' different choices, for example regarding the usage of tones, intervals, and harmonies. Analyzing the tonal content of pieces of music and observing them over time is thus in ...

Springernature2024

Hearing structure in music: An empirical inquiry into listening as representation and processing

Gabriele Cecchetti

As a universal expression of human creativity, music is capable of conveying great subtlety and complexity. Crucially, this complexity is not encoded in the score or in the sounds, but is rather construed in the mind of the listener in the form of nuanced ...

EPFL2024

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

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Johannes Hentschel, Gabriele Cecchetti, Sabrina Laneve, 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 interpretabil ...

2023

The Structure of Free Polyphony

Christoph Finkensiep

The human ability to perceive and understand music is remarkable. From an unstructured stream of acoustic input it creates a wide range of experiences, from psycho-acoustic effects to emotional and aesthetic responses. One such set of phenomena is the expe ...

EPFL2023

Interpreting Rhythm as Parsing: Syntactic-Processing Operations Predict the Migration of Visual Flashes as Perceived During Listening to Musical Rhythms

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Steffen Alexander Herff, Gabriele Cecchetti

Music can be interpreted by attributing syntactic relationships to sequential musical events, and, computationally, such musical interpretation represents an analogous combinatorial task to syntactic processing in language. While this perspective has been ...

Wiley2023

An Annotated Corpus of Tonal Piano Music from the Long 19th Century

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Fabian Claude Moss, Johannes Hentschel, Markus Franz Josef Neuwirth

We present a dataset of 264 annotated piano pieces of nine composers, composed in the long 19th century (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7483349). Annotations adhere to the DCML harmony annotation standard and include Roman numerals, phrase boundaries, and ...

Ohio State Univ, Sch Music2023

The Claude Debussy Solo Piano Corpus

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

This dataset originates from the DCML corpus initiative and contains musicological research data. For more information, please refer to its documentation page https://dcmlab.github.io/debussy_piano Please cite this dataset as Laneve, S., Schaerf ...

Zenodo2023

MuseReduce: A Generic Framework for Hierarchical Music Analysis

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Petter Harald Ericson

In comparison to computational linguistics, with its abundance of natural-language datasets, corpora of music analyses are rather fewer and generally smaller. This is partly due to difficulties inherent to the encoding of music analyses, whose multimodal r ...

Humanities Commons2023

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

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

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) consis ...

SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD2022