Publications related to Music education

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

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

ms3: A parser for MuseScore files, serving as data factory for annotated music corpora

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Johannes Hentschel

The Python library ms3 makes scores (symbolic representations of music) operational for computational approaches by representing their contents as sets of tabular files. Music scores represent relations between sounding events by graphical means. The Free ...

2023

Automated music composition and generation system and method

Florian François Colombo

An automated music composition and generation system for automatically harmonizing digital pieces of music using an automated music composition and generation engine for multi-voice music harmonization, including a system-user interface configured to input ...

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

Increased functional connectivity in the right dorsal auditory stream after a full year of piano training in healthy older adults

Dimitri Nestor Alice Van De Ville

Learning to play an instrument at an advanced age may help to counteract or slow down age-related cognitive decline. However, studies investigating the neural underpinnings of these effects are still scarce. One way to investigate the effects of brain plas ...

Nature Portfolio2023

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

Phantom Curves: Scientific Discovery through Interactive Music Visualization

Daniel Harasim, Fabian Claude Moss

We introduce phantom curves, a novel music-theoretical concept based on the discrete Fourier transform (DFT), and document the creative process that led to their discovery. In particular, we emphasize the importance of interactive web applications for musi ...

ACM2022

midiVERTO: A Web Application to Visualize Tonality in Real Time

Daniel Harasim, Fabian Claude Moss

This paper presents a web application for visualizing the tonality of a piece of music-the organization of its chords and scales-at a high level of abstraction and with coordinated playback. The application applies the discrete Fourier transform to the pit ...

SPRINGER INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING AG2022

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

The TACS Model: Understanding Primary School Teachers’ Adoption of Computer Science Pedagogical Content

Francesco Mondada, Frédérique Michèle Chessel-Lazzarotto, Jessica Elke Dehler Zufferey, Barbara Bruno, Laila Abdelsalam El-Hamamsy

Context With the introduction of computer science (CS) into curricula worldwide, teachers’ adoption of CS-pedagogical content is essential to ensure the long-term success of reform initiatives. Continuing Professional Development (CPD) programs play a key ...

2022

Learning music composition with recurrent neural networks

Florian François Colombo

Throughout this thesis, we are interested in modeling music composition. To do so, we study the association of music theory concepts with the learning capabilities of recurrent neural networks. Especially, we explore numerical formalizations of music so th ...

EPFL2021

Music influences vividness and content of imagined journeys in a directed visual imagery task

Steffen Alexander Herff, Gabriele Cecchetti, Ken Jacques Alfonso Deguernel

Directed, intentional imagination is pivotal for self-regulation in the form of escapism and therapies for a wide variety of mental health conditions, such anxiety and stress disorders, as well as phobias. Clinical application in particular benefits from i ...

Nature Portfolio2021

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

Western listeners detect boundary hierarchy in Indian music: a segmentation study

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Tudor Popescu

How are listeners able to follow and enjoy complex pieces of music? Several theoretical frameworks suggest links between the process of listening and the formal structure of music, involving a division of the musical surface into structural units at multip ...

NATURE RESEARCH2021

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

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

Lyrics-Conditioned Neural Melody Generation

Simon Canales, Yi Yu

Generating melody from lyrics to compose a song has been a very interesting research topic in the area of artificial intelligence and music, which tries to predict generative music relationship between lyrics and melody. In this demonstration paper, by exp ...

SPRINGER INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING AG2020

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