Publications related to Musical improvisation

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

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

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

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

Positioning Left-hand Movement in Violin Performance: A System and User Study of Fingering Pattern Generation

Su Li, Yi-Hsin Jen

Organizing fingerings, i.e., choosing which fingers to press on which positions and strings, is a crucial step for playing the violin. As the violin fingering comprises several components, the mapping of a musical phrase to the corresponding fingering arra ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2021

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

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

Harmony and form in Brazilian Choro: A corpus-driven approach to musical style analysis

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Fabian Claude Moss

This corpus study constitutes the first quantitative style analysis of Choro, a primarily instrumental music genre that emerged in Brazil at the end of the 19th century. We evaluate its description in a recent comprehensive textbook by transcribing the cho ...

2020

Axiomatic scale theory

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Daniel Harasim

Scales are a fundamental concept of musical practice around the world. They commonly exhibit symmetry properties that are formally studied using cyclic groups in the field of mathematical scale theory. This paper proposes an axiomatic framework for mathema ...

TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD2020

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

Voice-leading Schema Recognition using Rhythm and Pitch Features

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Markus Franz Josef Neuwirth, Christoph Finkensiep, Ken Jacques Alfonso Deguernel

Musical schemata constitute important structural building blocks used across historical styles and periods. They consist of two or more melodic lines that are combined to form specific successions of intervals. This paper tackles the problem of recognizing ...

ISMIR2020

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

The pleasantness of sensory dissonance is mediated by musical style and expertise

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Fabian Claude Moss, Markus Franz Josef Neuwirth, Tudor Popescu

Western musical styles use a large variety of chords and vertical sonorities. Based on objective acoustical properties, chords can be situated on a dissonant-consonant continuum. While this might to some extent converge with the unpleasant-pleasant continu ...

Nature Research2019

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