Publications by Christoph Finkensiep

Chord Types and Figuration: A Bayesian Learning Model of Extended Chord Profiles

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Christoph Finkensiep, Petter Harald Ericson

Making sense of a musical excerpt is an acquired skill that depends on previous musical experience. Having acquired familiarity with different types of chords, a listener can distinguish tones in a musical texture that outline these chords (i.e., chord ton ...

2025

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, Christoph Finkensiep, Daniel Harasim, Gabriele Cecchetti, Steffen Alexander Herff

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

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

Hierarchical syntactic structure predicts listeners’ sequence completion in music

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

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, Christoph Finkensiep, Gabriele Cecchetti, Steffen Alexander Herff

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 Jazz Harmony Treebank

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Christoph Finkensiep, Daniel Harasim, Petter Harald Ericson

Grammatical models which represent the hierarchical structure of chord sequences have proven very useful in recent analyses of Jazz harmony. A critical resource for building and evaluating such models is a ground-truth database of syntax trees that encode ...

ISMIR2020

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

Modelling the Syntax of North Indian Melodies with a Generalized Graph Grammar

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Christoph Finkensiep

Hierarchical models of music allow explanation of highly complex musical structure based on the general principle of recursive elaboration and a small set of orthogonal operations. Recent approaches to melodic elaboration have converged to a representation ...

ISMIR2019

Generalized Skipgrams for Pattern Discovery in Polyphonic Streams

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Markus Franz Josef Neuwirth, Christoph Finkensiep

The discovery of patterns using a minimal set of assumptions constitutes a central challenge in the modeling of polyphonic music and complex streams in general. Skipgrams have been found to be a powerful model for capturing semi-local dependencies in seque ...

2018