Measurement and analysis of timing asynchronies in ensemble performance
Gang Ren, Stephen Roessner, Samarth Hosakere Shivaswamy, Dave Headlam, Mark F. Bocko · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2012
Timing asynchrony is an important timing descriptor of ensemble music performance. In this paper the timing asynchrony is measured as offsets between “concurring” music onsets. Specifically we measure the offset between music note onsets that are prescribed to be synchronized according to the music score. First, we conduct measurements on the multi-track audio with separate instrument tracks. These multi-track materials are recorded by using acoustically isolated recording booth or by conducting multiple recording rounds. We then perform statistical analysis both on individual asynchrony points and on asynchrony points at key coordination locations, such as the start and the end of a music phrase. We emphasize in the analysis that the musical timing asynchronies should not be treated only as performance discrepancies because part of these micro-deviation patterns provide artistic “lively” elements. We also generalize the proposed framework to mixed-down polyphonic recordings. For polyphonic recordings where clear onsets can be identified we perform similar measurement and analysis algorithms as for separated multi-track recordings. For mixed-down polyphonic recordings where a clear separation of instrument tracks is not possible, we use onset dispersions, which measure the offset range of sonic partials onsets in an coordination points, as an alternative timing asynchrony descriptor.