Publications de Gabriele Cecchetti

Solitary silence and social sounds: music can influence mental imagery, inducing thoughts of social interactions

Gabriele Cecchetti, Steffen Alexander Herff

The COVID-19 pandemic was accompanied by a marked increase in the use of music listening for self-regulation. During these challenging times, listeners reported they used music ‘to keep them company’; indicating that they may have turned to music for socia ...

2025

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

Hierarchical syntax model of music predicts theta power during music listening

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Gabriele Cecchetti, Steffen Alexander Herff

Linguistic research showed that the depth of syntactic embedding is reflected in brain theta power. Here, we test whether this also extends to non-linguistic stimuli, specifically music. We used a hierarchical model of musical syntax to continuously quanti ...

2024

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

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Johannes Hentschel, Gabriele Cecchetti, Ludovica Schaerf, Sabrina Laneve

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

Interpreting Rhythm as Parsing: Syntactic-Processing Operations Predict the Migration of Visual Flashes as Perceived During Listening to Musical Rhythms

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Gabriele Cecchetti, Steffen Alexander Herff

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

The Claude Debussy Solo Piano Corpus

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Johannes Hentschel, Gabriele Cecchetti, Ludovica Schaerf, Sabrina Laneve

This dataset originates from the DCML corpus initiative and contains musicological research data. For more information, please refer to its documentation page https://dcmlab.github.io/debussy_piano Please cite this dataset as Laneve, S., Schaerf ...

Zenodo2023

Musical Garden Paths: Evidence for Syntactic Revision Beyond the Linguistic Domain

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Gabriele Cecchetti, Steffen Alexander Herff

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

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

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

Musical syntactic structure improves memory for melody: evidence from the processing of ambiguous melodies

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Gabriele Cecchetti, Steffen Alexander Herff

Memories of most stimuli in the auditory and other domains are prone to the disruptive interference of intervening events, whereby memory performance continuously declines as the number of intervening events increases. However, melodies in a familiar music ...

2021

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

Gabriele Cecchetti, Steffen Alexander Herff, 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