I am a Research Fellow in Cultural Analytics at the Media Studies Department at University of Amsterdam (UvA). I am also affiliated with the Language & Music Cognition (LMC) research unit at UvA’s Institute for Language, Logic and Computation (ILLC). I engage with the activities of the Music Cognition Group (MCG) and the Amsterdam Music Lab (AML) as well as with the project Creative Amsterdam: an e-Humanities Perspective (CREATE).
My research is inherently interdisciplinary and aims to bridge the humanities and the sciences. I draw on methods and concepts from Musicology and Music Theory, Mathematics, Music Information Retrieval, Data Science & Machine Learning, Music Psychology & Cognition, and the Digital Humanities. Working with large symbolic datasets of musical scores and harmonic annotations, I am primarily interested in Computational Music Analysis, Music Theory, Music Cognition, and their mutual relationship.
Before my appointment at UvA, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Digital and Cognitive Musicology Lab (DCML) at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL, Switzerland) for the project Distant Listening: The Development of Harmony over Three Centuries (1700–2000), funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (PI: Martin Rohrmeier). I also directed the project Digitizing the Dualism Debate: A Case Study in the Computational Analysis of Historical Music Sources, supported by the EPFL-UNIL funding scheme CROSS - Collaborative Research on Science and Society.
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.
Journal Articles, Conference Papers, Datasets
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.
This paper presents a web application for visualizing the tonality of a piece of music—the organization of its chords and scales—at a high level of abstraction and with coordinated playback.