Attempts to Reproduce a Pianist?s Expressive Timing with Director Musices Performance Rules
Johan Sundberg, Anders Friberg, Roberto Bresin · Journal of New Music Research · 2003
The Director Musices generative grammar of music performance is a system of context dependent rules that automatically introduces expressive deviation in performances of input score files. A number of these rule concern timing. In this investigation the ability of such rules to reproduce a professional pianist’s timing deviations from nominal note inter-onset-intervals is examined. Rules affecting tone inter-onset-intervals were first tested one by one for the various sections of the excerpt, and then in combinations. Results were evaluated in terms of the correlation between the deviations made by the pianist and by the rule system. It is found that rules reflecting the phrase structure produced high correlations in some sections. On the other hand, some rules failed to produce significant correlation with the pianist’s deviations, and thus seemed irrelevant to the particular performance analysed. It is concluded that phrasing was a prominent principle in this performance and that rule combinations have to change between sections in order to match this pianist’s deviations.