Fabian C. Moss

Assistant Professor for Digital Music Philology and Music Theory

Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg

Welcome!

I am an assistant professor for Digital Music Philology and Music Theory in the Institut für Musikforschung at Julius-Maximilians University Würzburg (JMU), Germany, and I am also affiliated with the Zentrum für Philologie und Digitalität (ZPD).

In my research, I bridge concepts and methodologies from the humanities and the sciences, and aim to understand music and its structure from an inherently interdisciplinary perspective, involving fields such as musicology and music theory, mathematics, music information retrieval, data science and machine learning, music cognition, and the digital humanities. One of my central interests lies in analysing large digital corpora in order to better understand musical styles, especially from a historical viewpoint. More specifically, I work with large symbolic datasets of musical scores and harmonic annotations. I am also interested in computational modeling of music and its perception, and am fascinated by quantitative approaches to model historical processes.

I teach courses covering a wide range of topics in music theory, computational musicology, and digital tools.

Before my appointment to JMU, I have worked as a Research Fellow in Cultural Analytics at University of Amsterdam (Media Studies Department & Data Science Centre), and before that as doctoral and postdoctoral researcher at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)’s Digital and Cognitive Musicology Lab. Supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), I visited the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as a research PhD student and spent a semester at Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya (ESMUC) funded by the ERASMUS program of the European Union.

Research Interests

Computational Musicology · Corpus Studies and Stylometry · Music Theory and Analysis · Digital Humanities · Cultural Evolution

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Publications

Journal Articles, Conference Papers, Datasets

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Challenging sources: a new dataset for OMR of diverse 19th-century music theory examples

This paper introduces the 19MT-OMR corpus that can be used to test OMR models on a diverse set of sources. We illustrate this challenge by discussing several examples from this data set.

Fabian C. Moss, Néstor Nápoles López, Maik Köster, David Rizo

Challenging sources: a new dataset for OMR of diverse 19th-century music theory examples

Phantom Curves: Scientific Discovery through Interactive Music Visualization

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

Fabian C. Moss, Giovanni Affatato, Daniel Harasim

Phantom Curves: Scientific Discovery through Interactive Music Visualization

Towards a Unified Model of Chords in Western Harmony

Johannes Hentschel, Fabian C. Moss, Andrew McLeod, Markus Neuwirth, Martin Rohrmeier

The line of fifths and the co-evolution of tonal pitch-classes

In this study, we determine the fundamental role of the line of fifths for the organization of tonal material by applying dimensionality reduction to a large historical corpus of pitch-class counts (ca. 1360–1940). We observe a historically growing trend in the exploitation of the fifths range, i.e. the size of segments that pitch-class distributions cover on the line of fifths. Moreover, we introduce the novel concept of pitch-class (co-)evolution.

Fabian C. Moss, Markus Neuwirth, Martin Rohrmeier

The line of fifths and the co-evolution of tonal pitch-classes

Wavescapes: A visual hierarchical analysis of tonality using the discrete Fourier transform

We introduce wavescapes, a novel visualization method for tonal hierarchies that combines the visual representation of keyscapes with music analysis based on the discrete Fourier transformation (DFT) and illustrate it by analyzing compositions by Josquin, Bach, Liszt, Chopin, Scriabin, Webern, Coltrane, and Ligeti.

Cédric Viaccoz, Daniel Harasim, Fabian C. Moss, Martin Rohrmeier

Wavescapes: A visual hierarchical analysis of tonality using the discrete Fourier transform

Discovering Tonal Profiles with Latent Dirichlet Allocation

In this study, we use the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model to discover tonal structures in a corpus of more than 2000 musical pieces from large historical range (ca. 600 years). and that the inferred topics have music-theoretically meaningful interpretations.

Fabian C. Moss, Martin Rohrmeier

Discovering Tonal Profiles with Latent Dirichlet Allocation

FAIR, Open, Linked: Introducing the Special Issue on Open Science in Musicology

Fabian C. Moss, Markus Neuwirth

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Research & Projects

Present and past

Fabian C. Moss

Jul 4, 2023 corpus studies, digital humanities, computational musicology

Computational and Digital Approaches to Music Scholarship (CODAMUS)

As musicologists continue to explore new ways of analyzing, understanding, and creating music through the use of digital methods and computational models, new questions and avenues for research and scholarship arise. CODAMUS aims at providing a glimpse into the exciting intersections of music and technology.

Fabian C. Moss

Jul 4, 2023 digital humanities, music theory

Virtual Tonal Spaces (VTS)

The high dimensionality of music means that even digital representations on screen do not convey tonal spaces with sufficient clarity. Here, the extended field of view and the higher degrees of freedom of virtual reality environments offer the possibility to express musical parameters more clearly through aesthetic parameters and thus generate a better understanding among learners.

Fabian C. Moss, Daniel Harasim, Giovanni Affatato

Jul 1, 2021 music theory, digital humanities

Enabling interactive music visualization for a wider community (midiVERTO)

This project aims at bridging the gap between mathematical music theory and music enthusiasts. In recent years, music theorists have discovered that the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) can be used to analyze the pitch-class content of pieces of music, for instance to compare the tonal organization of different pieces.

Fabian C. Moss, François Bavaud, Colline Métrailler, Maik Köster, Melinda Femminis

Jan 1, 2021 digital humanities, music theory, corpus studies

Digitizing the Dualism Debate (DDD)

The “dualism debate”, a ‘hot topic’ in 19th-century German music theory, is concerned with the mutual relationship of major and minor triads, specifically whether the minor triad is a mere derivative of the major triad or whether it can be derived from first principles on its own right. This project strives to reconstruct and critically evaluate the discursive relations within this debate by using the combined power of qualitative-historical and quantitative-numerical methods and thus serve to build methodological bridges between the humanities and the sciences.