Panayotis Mavromatis

Assistant Professor of Music and Music Education: Director of Music Theory

Phone: (212) 998-5287
Email: panos.mavromatis@nyu.edu

Panayotis Mavromatis received his B.A. and M.A. in mathematics from Cambridge University in England, his M.A. in physics from Boston University, and his Ph.D. in music theory from the Eastman School of Music. His research integrates cognitive science, linguistics and computer science into traditional music disciplines. In his dissertation research, he developed a computer model of melody in modern Greek church chant and explored its cognitive implications.

Awards

2006 : 2005 W. Gabriel Carras Junior Faculty Research Award, Steinhardt School
2005 : 2006 Summer Grant Development Award, Steinhardt School

Publications

Mavromatis, P. “Set Theory.” In The Harvard Dictionary of Music, 4th ed. Ed. Don M. Randel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Brown, M. and Mavromatis, P. Review of Unfoldings by Carl Schachter. Journal of Music Theory 45/2 (2001): 457-469.
Mavromatis, P. and Brown, M. "Parsing Context-Free Grammars for Music: A Computational Model of Schenkerian Analysis." In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, Evanston, IL, 2004. S. D. Lipscomb, R. Ashley, R. O. Gjerdingen, and P. Webster (Eds.) Adelaide, Australia: Causal Productions.
Mavromatis, P. "A Hidden Markov Model of Melody in Greek Church Chant." In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, Evanston, IL, 2004. S. D. Lipscomb, R. Ashley, R. O. Gjerdingen, and P. Webster (Eds.) Adelaide, Australia: Causal Productions.
Mavromatis, P. “A Hidden Markov Model of Melody Production in Greek Church Chant.” Computing in Musicology 14 (2005): 93-112. (link)

Research Interests

Music Cognition
Computational Modeling
Schenkerian Theory
Post-Tonal Theory
Byzantine Chant
Ethnomusicology

Presentations

The Perceptual Relevance of Similarity Measures in Music Theory
Invited lecture, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, February 1997. With Virginia Williamson.
Similarity in Atonal Music Theory: A Perceptual Study
Paper presented at the annual conference of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition, Cambridge, Massachusetts, August 1997. With Virginia Williamson.
The Combinatorial Model of Contour Perception
Paper presented at the annual conference of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition, Cambridge, Massachusetts, August 1997. With Ian Quinn.
Similarity of Pitch-Class Sets: A Perceptual Study
Paper presented at the annual conference of the Society for Music Theory, Phoenix, Arizona, November 1997. With Virginia Williamson.
The Early Keyboard Prelude as an Agent in the Formation of Schenkerian Background Prototypes
Paper presented at the Third International Schenker Symposium, New York, March 1999.
Toward a Perceptual Model for Categorizing Atonal Sonorities
Invited lecture, Penn State University, State College, Pennsylvania, April 1999. With Virginia Williamson.
Categorizing Atonal Sonorities: Multidimensional Scaling, Tree-Fitting and Clustering Compared
Paper presented at the annual conference of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition, Evanston, Illinois, August 1999. With Virginia Williamson.
Toward a Perceptual Model for Categorizing Atonal Sonorities
Paper presented at the annual conference of the Society for Music Theory, Atlanta, Georgia, November 1999. With Virginia Williamson.
Modeling Expertise at Tonal Composition: A Preliminary Report
Report to the Electrical Engineering Department, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, 2000. With Matthew Brown.
Minimal Description Length: An Information-Theoretic Approach to Music Model Building
Invited paper presented at the Southeastern Sectional Meeting of the American Mathematical Society, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, March 2003.
A Probabilistic Model of Melodic Process in Greek Church Chant
Paper presented at the annual conference of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition, Las Vegas, Nevada, June 2003.
A Declarative Model of Schenkerian Theory/Analysis Using Prolog
Paper presented at the annual conference of the Society for Music Theory, Madison, Wisconsin, November 2003. With Matthew Brown.
Parsing Context-Free Grammars for Music: A Computational Model of Schenkerian Analysis
Paper presented at the 8th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, Evanston, Illinois, August 2004. With Matthew Brown.
A Hidden Markov Model of Melody in Greek Church Chant
Paper presented at the 8th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, Evanston, Illinois, August 2004.
Bayesian Learning of Musical Grammars from Data
Invited talk presented at the Eastman School of Music/University of Rochester/Cornell University Music Cognition Symposium, April 2004.
Hidden Markov Models of Melodic Improvisation
Invited talk presented at the NYU Workshop on Computational and Biological Learning, January 2004.