Publications de Gabriele Cecchetti

Solitary silence and social sounds: music can influence mental imagery, inducing thoughts of social interactions

Steffen Alexander Herff, Gabriele Cecchetti

The COVID-19 pandemic was accompanied by a marked increase in the use of music listening for self-regulation. During these challenging times, listeners reported they used music ‘to keep them company’; indicating that they may have turned to music for socia ...

2025

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

Hierarchical syntax model of music predicts theta power during music listening

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Steffen Alexander Herff, Gabriele Cecchetti

Linguistic research showed that the depth of syntactic embedding is reflected in brain theta power. Here, we test whether this also extends to non-linguistic stimuli, specifically music. We used a hierarchical model of musical syntax to continuously quanti ...

2024

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

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

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

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

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Steffen Alexander Herff, Gabriele Cecchetti

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 ...

Wiley2022

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

Hierarchical syntactic structure predicts listeners’ sequence completion in music

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

Studies in psycho-linguistics have provided compelling evidence that theoretical syntactic structures have cognitive correlates that inform and influence language perception. Generative grammar models also present a principled way to represent a plethora o ...

2021

The experience of musical structure as computation : what can we learn?

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

This paper presents an overview of the epistemological grounding of the computational approach to musical syntax as a tool to advance our understanding of the cognitive underpinnings of the musical experience. From the proposed perspective, formulations of ...

2021