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38
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Introduction
I am interested in studying the ways extra-musical meaning is being formed and communicated through music.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
November 2009 - December 2013
Position
- PhD Student
Description
- Semantics and perception of musical timbre
Publications
Publications (38)
Studies of timbre are usually conducted in a “vacuum” of perfect silence. However, in the real-world, sounds are mostly heard in the presence of competing background noise. A series of pairwise dissimilarity listening tests on musically trained participants demonstrated how different levels of background noise can cause rearrangement of timbre spac...
Cross-modal correspondences between audition and olfaction have received relatively less attention compared to other modality pairs. This study expands on previous work regarding timbre-aroma correspondences by examining the semantic mediation hypothesis, according to which cross-modal correspondences may be partly explained by the existence of com...
Το ηχόχρωμα αποτελεί την πιο περίπλοκη αλλά και ταυτόχρονα συναρπαστική ιδιότητα του μουσικού ήχου. Η πληροφορία που περικλείει επιτρέπει, μεταξύ άλλων, την ταυτοποίηση μιας ηχητικής πηγής αλλά και τον προσδιορισμό της αισθητικής ποιότητας ενός ηχητικού αντικειμένου. Κατά συνέπεια παίζει καθοριστικό ρόλο στην αντίληψη και την εκτίμηση της μουσικής....
The examination of cross-modal correspondences between auditory and olfactory senses opens up an intriguing perspective into the study of extra-musical meaning. In a behavioral experiment, musically trained participants were presented with 26 complex synthetic tones and 12 aromatic stimuli. Their task was to report potential associations between th...
Recent advances in music source separation through deep learning algorithms have enabled the isolation of vocals from recordings where separate tracks are not available. We have used Demucs (v4) Music Source Separation (Défossez, 2021; Rouard et al., 2023) to obtain isolated vocal parts from song recordings by Vasilis Tsitsanis, a prominent songwri...
Stelios Kazantzidis is one of the most prominent singers of popular Greek music with a career spanning from the 1950s till the end of the 20th century. His collaboration with the iconic composer Vassilis Tsitsanis, shaped the post-war Greek music scene and he later collaborated with most of the prominent Greek composers of popular music. One of his...
There is mounting evidence that sound and music are capable of influencing gustatory experiences (e.g., Crisinel, 2012; Wang et al., 2015; Wang & Spence, 2016; Carvalho et al., 2016; Carvalho et al., 2017). This effect is known as sonic seasoning (Spence, 2017). It is common in studies investigating this phenomenon to make use of existing music (Sp...
In this study we look into how repeated listening to a classical music excerpt may affect the perception of its structure and to what extent types of repetition may shape the perception of musical entities. Thirty-eight participants with musical training were asked to indicate in real-time the points where they identified the introduction of 'music...
Musically induced tension has been the subject of thorough study in the music cognition literature but its relationship with timbre is still poorly investigated. This study examines how the dynamic variation of a tone's inharmonicity may affect a number of auditory qualities, namely brightness, roughness and mass along with felt tension under diffe...
CHAMELEON is a computational melodic harmonization assistant. It can harmonize a given melody according to a number of independent harmonic idioms or blends between idioms based on principles of conceptual blending theory. Thus, the system is capable of offering a wealth of possible solutions and viewpoints for melodic harmonization. This study inv...
This paper presents an experiment designed to investigate the influence of a creativity support tool on music creation. Twenty five participants were asked to harmonise two very similar melodies, the first on their own and the second while given the opportunity to interact with the CHAMELEON harmonisation assistant. CHAMELEON can offer a variety of...
The aim of computer-aided musical orchestration (CAMO) is to find a combination of musical instrument sounds that perceptually approximates a reference sound when played together. The complexity of timbre perception and the combinatorial explosion of all possible musical instrument sound combinations make it very challenging to find even one orches...
This piece of research aimed to further investigate the relationships between tone inharmonicity, timbral semantics and perceived musical tension. Thus, a connection between the luminance-texture-mass (LTM) model of timbral semantics (Zacharakis et al., 2014; Zacharakis & Pastiadis, 2016) and the concept of musical tension -which is not often studi...
This paper presents an empirical experiment aiming to investigate the potential influence of timbral semantics on tension induction in Greek traditional folk music. To this end, a group of seventeen listeners rated the evolution of auditory luminance, texture and mass together with the felt tension over sixteen musical excerpts in real-time. Correl...
This article presents the CHAMELEON melodic harmonisation assistant that utilises the principles of conceptual blending theory as a means for the invention of hybrid or novel harmonic idioms and an empirical evaluation of a number of computer-generated melodic harmonisation blends. Melodies originating from various idioms were harmonised either acc...
This chapter presents the CHAMELEON melodic harmonisation assistant that learns different aspects of harmony from expert-annotated data, blends learnt harmonies from different idioms using the COINVENT framework and harmonises user-given melodies. The learnt harmonic elements include chord types, chord transitions, cadences and bass voice leading,...
THE COGNITIVE THEORY OF CONCEPTUAL BLENDING may be employed to understand the way music becomes meaningful and, at the same time, it may form a basis for musical creativity per se. This work constitutes a case study whereby conceptual blending is used as a creative tool for inventing musical cadences. Specifically, the perfect and the renaissance P...
This study presents a listening experiment designed to further examine the previously proposed luminance-texture-mass (LTM) model for timbral semantics. Thirty-two musically trained listeners rated twenty-four instrument tones on six predefined semantic scales, namely, brilliance, depth, roundness, warmth, fullness, and richness. The selection of t...
Conceptual blending when used as a creative tool combines the features of two input spaces, generating new blended spaces that share the common structure of the inputs, as well as different combinations of their non-common parts. In the case of music, conceptual blending has been employed creatively, among others, in generating new cadences (pairs...
How can harmony in diverse idioms be represented in a machine learning system and how can learned harmonic descriptions of two musical idioms be blended to create new ones? This paper presents a creative melodic harmonisation assistant that employs statistical learning to learn harmonies from human annotated data in practically any style, blends th...
Conceptual blending is a powerful tool for computational creativity where, for example, the properties of two harmonic spaces may be combined in a consistent manner to produce a novel harmonic space. However, deciding about the importance of property features in the input spaces and evaluating the results of conceptual blending is a nontrivial task...
This study presents a listening experiment designed to further examine the previously proposed luminance-texture-mass (LTM) model for timbral semantics. Thirty two musically trained listeners rated twenty four instrument tones on six predefined semantic scales, namely, brilliance, depth, roundness, warmth, fullness and richness. The selection of th...
The current study expands our previous work on interlanguage musical timbre semantics by examining the relationship between semantics and perception of timbre. Following Zacharakis, Pastiadis, and Reiss (2014), a pairwise dissimilarity listening test involving participants from two separate linguistic groups (Greek and English) was conducted. Subse...
Conceptual blending is a cognitive theory whereby elements from diverse, but structurally-related, mental spaces are 'blended' giving rise to new conceptual spaces. This study focuses on structural blending utilising an algorith-mic formalisation for conceptual blending applied to harmonic concepts. More specifically, it investigates the ability of...
The General Chord Type (GCT) representation is appropriate for encoding tone simultaneities in any harmonic context (such as tonal, modal, jazz, octatonic, atonal). The GCT allows the rearrangement of the notes of a harmonic sonority such that abstract idiom-specific types of chords may be derived. This encoding is inspired by the standard roman nu...
A study of musical timbre semantics was
conducted with listeners from two different linguistic
groups. In two separate experiments, native Greek and
English speaking participants were asked to describe
23 musical instrument tones of variable pitch using
a predefined vocabulary of 30 adjectives. The common
experimental protocol facilitated the inves...
Electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings, and especially the Mu-rhythm over the sensorimotor cortex that relates to the activation of the mirror neuron system (MNS), were acquired from two subject groups (orchestral musicians and nonmusicians), in order to explore action representation processes involved in the perception and performance of musical pi...
A study on the verbal attributes of musical timbre was conducted in an effort to identify the most significant semantic descriptors and to quantify the association between prominent timbral aspects and several categorical properties of environmental entities. A verbal attribute magnitude estimation (VAME) type of listening test in which participant...
An algorithm that achieves independent modification of two low-level features that are correlated with the auditory perceptions of brightness and warmth was implemented. The perceptual validity of the algo-rithm was tested through a series of listening tests in order to examine whether the low-level modification was indeed perceived as independent...
Sensorimotor activity in response to motion reflecting audiovisual titillation is studied in this article. EEG recordings, and especially the Mu-rhythm over the sensorimotor cortex (C3, CZ, and C4 electrodes), were acquired and explored. An experiment was designed to provide auditory (Modest Mussorgsky's "Promenade" theme) and visual (synchronized...
‘Motion’, as expressed through high-level features of music, combined with mirror neuron (MN) system activation is studied in this article. The mechanism of MN involved in the perception of musical structures is seen as a means for cueing the learner on ‘known’ factors that can be used for his/her knowledge scaffolding. To explore such relationship...
