music theory

Here, we introduce music-theoretically sensible notions of harmonic distance between chords, that allows us to arrive at more fine-grained results regarding relative influences of different kinds of harmonic relations on diachronic changes.

The project “Digtial Choro: Exploring the potential of digitization and computational models for Brazil’s musical cultural heritage” aims to utilize digitization and data-driven methods to develop computational models of the complex genesis of Choro, a Brazilian instrumental music genre.

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.

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.

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.

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.