Publications related to Music and emotion

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

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

The Impact of Voice Leading and Harmony on Musical Expectancy

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Markus Franz Josef Neuwirth, Robert Lieck

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

Prefrontal High Gamma in ECoG Tags Periodicity of Musical Rhythms in Perception and Imagination

Steffen Alexander Herff

Rhythmic auditory stimuli are known to elicit matching activity patterns in neural populations. Furthermore, recent research has established the particular importance of high-gamma brain activity in auditory processing by showing its involvement in auditor ...

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

Music processing in preterm and full-term newborns: A psychophysiological interaction (PPI) approach in neonatal fMRI

Dimitri Nestor Alice Van De Ville, Serafeim Loukas, François Lazeyras

Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICU) provide special equipment designed to give life support for the increasing number of prematurely born infants and assure their survival. More recently NICU's strive to include developmentally oriented care and modulate ...

2019

Harmonic Syntax in Time: Rhythm Improves Grammatical Models of Harmony

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Daniel Harasim

Music is hierarchically structured, both in how it is perceived by listeners and how it is composed. Such structure can be elegantly captured using probabilistic grammatical models similar to those used to study natural language. They address the complexit ...

ISMIR2019