- Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
- Active since February 2024
- Principal investigator: Prof. Dr. Martin Rohrmeier
This project is a continuation of our previous SNSF project “Distant Listening The Development of Harmony over Three Centuries”. Our research bridges the disciplines of music theory, digital musicology, computational modeling, data science, and corpus methods. Building on our previous achievements, the project continuation focuses on the varieties of harmonic tonality and explores the different varieties of harmonic tonality and extended tonal languages, particularly, in the transitions from the 18th to the 19th and 20th century.
Our Research Focus
We analyze music at a “distant-listening” scale, using large datasets to identify historical patterns that are often invisible during a single close-reading of a score. Our work is divided into three core pillars:
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Computational Modeling: We are building high-precision tools to analyze polyphonic music at the note level. This includes developing models of structural roles of single notes, models of harmonic reduction and inference as well as robust models to analyze musical performance.
- Music Processing Tools: we are developing different computational tools to represent, process and visualize musical structures at a symbolic level.
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Corpus Innovation: Our team is creating, curating and publishing digital datasets of digital scores and expert-annotated analyses. Our corpora range from the 17th to the 20th century.
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Distant Listening and Digital Historical Narratives: Traditional music history often relies on a few “museum works” to define entire eras. Our “distant listening” approach avoids these biases by analyzing thousands of pieces. Using statistical models, we track the gradual (rather than disruptive) shift toward harmonic diversification and extended tonality. We examine how harmonic vocabulary and patterns changed over time and established complex forms of musical syntax. Our macroscopic approach offers a generalized backdrop against which empirically informed interpretations of individual cases can take place.