Research
My research interests are primarily in Computational Musicology (CM) and Translation. In the world of CM, my work centers on rhythmic search, annotation, and alignment. I have applied this work (see decitala under Software) to study Olivier Messiaen’s use of Greek and Carnatic rhythm, particularly in his transcriptions of birdsong. My aim is to try and explain––using computational methods––why “Messiaen’s birds sound like Messiaen.” (Goehr) I have also done some work in contour theory, implementing algorithms (Morris 1993, Schultz 2008, Wallintinsen 2014) for contour reduction. My translation work mainly involves Sanskrit texts on rhythm (though I also translate Sanskrit poetry and stories; see Translation), such as Śārṅgadeva’s (शार्ङ्गदेव) Saṅgītaratnākara (सङ्गीतरत्नाकर).
I was an intern in Dr. Nori Jacoby’s Computational Auditory Perception (CAP) research group at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics between 2020 and 2022. My work there centered on melodic production/perception, vowel production/perception, and musical experiments (including an ongoing collaboration with Victoria Hanna and the Kronos Quartet).
Excerpt from the Sudhākara’s Commentary on the Saṅgītaratnākara
Excerpt from Grosset’s chapter “Inde”
PUBLICATIONS & PROCEEDINGS (Last Updated September 20, 2021)
Conference
Jacoby N., Undurraga E., McPherson M., Poeppel L., Harrison P., Valdés Bize J., Ossandon T., McDermott J.. “Universal and non-universal features of musical pitch perception revealed by singing: converging evidence from cross-cultural and online experiments.” ICMPC16-ESCOM11 (2021).
Poeppel, Luke. “Notre Oiseaux: A Computational Study of the Messiaen Birdsong Transcriptions of New Caledonia.” Society for Music Theory Conference 2021. Poster Presentation
Under Review
Poeppel, Luke. 2021. “Unexpected Insights from the Algorithmic Reconstruction of Olivier Messiaen’s Rhythmic Language.”
In Preparation for Submission
Poeppel, Luke. “Palindromic Contour Symmetries in the Messiaen Birdsongs are an Artifact: A Commentary on Schultz (2008).”
Software
https://github.com/Luke-Poeppel/decitala : Implementation of general algorithm for rhythmic search and annotation (i.e. alignment). Optimized for the rhythmic analysis of Olivier Messiaen’s music via the Nelder-Mead algorithm. Also includes general tools for Messiaen research such as: Mode of Limited Transposition search, contour reduction algorithms (Schultz 2008, Morris 1993). See “Publications” for the relevant paper.
Documentation is available here: https://luke-poeppel.github.io/decitala/index.html (generated with sphinx).
https://github.com/Luke-Poeppel/povel_essens : A Python implementation of the Povel-Essens algorithm for C-Score generation. From “Perception of Temporal Patterns” (Music Perception, 1985).
https://github.com/Luke-Poeppel/treeplotter : A Python wrapper of the TreantJS library for tree and network plotting. Supports styling via Raphael and image attachments