Projects

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.

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.

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.

Harmony is an essential component of Western music at least since the middle ages up to the present day. In recent decades, musicologists have engaged more and more with computational methods and created machine-readable datasets in order to study harmony on a larger scale.

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.