Dr. Mauro Orsini Windholz

I am a postdoctoral Research Associate at the Institut für Musikforschung at Julius-Maximilians Universität Würzburg (JMU). My main research interest is understanding how humans derive meaning from pitch structures, otherwise known as musical harmony. I draw on several methodologies to pursue this question, including music theory, music analysis, behavioral psychology, and computational analysis of historical trends in music documents.

My current project involves understanding the harmonic vocabulary of Brazilian choro and its relationship to Western classical styles and other Brazilian styles. Choro is a popular style from Brazil with vast documentation in digitized form, thus particularly amenable to computational methods. Prior to this project, my PhD at Princeton University (U.S.) investigated how listeners associate genre and emotion labels to different styles of harmony, through behavioral experiments. In my Masters at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, I drew on embodied cognition principles to investigate the conceptual metaphors for the understanding of harmony (such as tension and color), and how they shape how listeners are affected by pitch structures. Other projects I worked on involved, for example, music and narrative and analysis of Brazilian 20th century classical music. 

Throughout these projects, my work has been heavily interdisciplinary, drawing from the cognitive sciences, philosophy, music theory, sociology of music and ethnomusicology to investigate the power of musical harmony. I have taught courses and lectures on music theory, the analysis of popular music, and music genre theory. Apart from academic work, I have ample experience as performer, arranger and composer of many styles, and have taught guitar, piano, ensemble practice and music theory outside of the university environment for many years.