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Concept

Tonality

Related publications (27)

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

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

Johannes Hentschel

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

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

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Johannes Hentschel, Gabriele Cecchetti

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

Fishing for complements with chord, scale, and rhythm nets

Daniel Harasim

The aim of this paper is to argue that complementation is an operation similarly fundamental to music theory as transposition and inversion. We focus on studying the chromatic complement mapping that translates diatonic seventh chords into 8-note scales wh ...

TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD2023

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

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, Steffen Alexander Herff, Daniel Harasim, 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

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

A Formal Model of Extended Tonal Harmony

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Fabian Claude Moss

Extended tonality is a central system that characterizes the music from the 19th up to the 21st century, including styles like popular music, film music or Jazz. Developing from classical major-minor tonality, the harmonic language of extended tonality for ...

2021

Modeling and Inferring Proto-Voice Structure in Free Polyphony

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Christoph Finkensiep

Voice leading is considered to play an important role in the structure of Western tonal music. However, the explicit voice assignment of a piece (if present at all) generally does not reflect all phenomena related to voice leading. Instead, voice-leading p ...

ISMIR2021

Discovering Tonal Profiles with Latent Dirichlet Allocation

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Fabian Claude Moss

Music analysis, in particular harmonic analysis, is concerned with the way pitches are organized in pieces of music, and a range of empirical applications have been developed, for example, for chord recognition or key finding. Naturally, these approaches r ...

2021

The Annotated Mozart Sonatas: Score, Harmony, and Cadence

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Johannes Hentschel, Markus Franz Josef Neuwirth

This article describes a new expert-labelled dataset featuring harmonic, phrase, and cadence analyses of all piano sonatas by W.A. Mozart. The dataset draws on the DCML standard for harmonic annotation and is being published adopting the FAIR principles of ...

2021

Exploring the foundations of tonality: statistical cognitive modeling of modes in the history of Western classical music

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Fabian Claude Moss, Daniel Harasim

Tonality is one of the most central theoretical concepts for the analysis of Western classical music. This study presents a novel approach for the study of its historical development, exploring in particular the concept of mode. Based on a large dataset of ...

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

The Impact of Voice Leading and Harmony on Musical Expectancy

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Markus Franz Josef Neuwirth, Robert Lieck, Leona Franziska Wall

In Western tonal music, voice leading (VL) and harmony are two central concepts influencing whether a musical sequence is perceived as well-formed. However, experimental studies have primarily focused on the effect of harmony on the cognitive processing of ...

Nature Research2020

The Tonal Diffusion Model

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Fabian Claude Moss, Robert Lieck

Pitch-class distributions are of central relevance in music information retrieval, computational musicology and various other fields, such as music perception and cognition. However, despite their structure being closely related to the cognitively and musi ...

2020

The Learnability of the Grammar of Jazz: Bayesian Inference of Hierarchical Structures in Harmony

Daniel Harasim

Musical grammar describes a set of principles that are used to understand and interpret the structure of a piece according to a musical style. The main topic of this study is grammar induction for harmony --- the process of learning structural principles f ...

EPFL2020

Statistical characteristics of tonal harmony: A corpus study of Beethoven’s string quartets

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Markus Franz Josef Neuwirth, Fabian Claude Moss, Daniel Harasim

Tonal harmony is one of the central organization systems of Western music. This article characterizes the statistical foundations of tonal harmony based on the computational analysis of expert annotations in a large corpus. Using resampling methods, this s ...

2019