publications

2025

1. Leveraging RAG for a Low-Resource Audio-Aware Diachronic Analysis of Gendered Toy Marketing

   Luca Marinelli, Iacopo Ghinassi, and Charalampos Saitis

   In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Language Models for Digital Humanities @ RANLP 2025, 2025

2024

1. Foundation models for music: A survey

   Yinghao Ma, Anders Øland, Anton Ragni, and 8 more authors

   arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.14340, 2024
2. Explainable Modeling of Gender-Targeting Practices in Toy Advertising Sound and Music

   Luca Marinelli and Charalampos Saitis

   In 2024 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing Workshops (ICASSPW), 2024
3. A multimodal understanding of the role of sound and music in gendered toy marketing

   Luca Marinelli, Petra Lucht, and Charalampos Saitis

   PLOS ONE, Nov 2024

   Abs DOI

   Literature in music theory and psychology shows that, even in isolation, musical sounds can reliably encode gender-loaded messages. Musical material can be imbued with many ideological dimensions and gender is just one of them. Nonetheless, studies of the gendering of music within multimodal communicative events are sparse and lack an encompassing theoretical framework. The present study attempts to address this literature gap by employing a critical quantitative analysis of music in gendered toy marketing, which integrated a content analytical approach with multimodal affective and music-focused perceptual responses. Ratings were collected on a set of 606 commercials spanning a ten-year time frame and strong gender polarization was observed in nearly all of the collected variables. Gendered music styles in toy commercials exhibit synergistic design choices, as music in masculine-targeted adverts was substantially more abrasive—louder, more inharmonious, and more distorted—than in feminine-targeted ones. Thus, toy advertising music appeared deliberately and consistently in line with traditional gender norms. In addition, music perceptual scales and voice-related content analytical variables explain quite well the heavily polarized affective ratings. This study presents a empirical understanding of the gendering of music as constructed within multimodal discourse, reiterating the importance of the sociocultural underpinnings of music cognition. We provided a public repository with all code and data necessary to reproduce the results of this study on github.com/marinelliluca/music-role-gender-marketing.

2023

1. Gender-Coded Sound: Analysing the Gendering of Music in Toy Commercials via Multi-Task Learning

   Luca Marinelli, György Fazekas, and Charis Saitis

   24th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2023), 2023

2020

1. Musical Dynamics Classification with CNN and Modulation Spectra

   Luca Marinelli, Athanasios Lykartsis, Stefan Weinzierl, and 1 more author

   In Proceedings of the 17th Sound and Music Computing Conference, Torino, Italy, 2020

2018

1. Position-based Attenuation and Amplification for Stereo Mixes

   Luca Marinelli and Holger Kirchhoff

   In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Digital Audio Effects (DAFx-18), Aveiro, Portugal, 2018