Computational analysis of expression in violin performance
Eric Cheng · University of Southern California Digital Library · 2015
This thesis presents computational methods for the quantitative description and analysis of expressive strategies in violin performances, and applies these methods to eleven commercially available audio recordings of the Andante movement from Bach's Sonata No. 2 for solo violin. First, we develop a methodology for the extraction of beat-level tempo and dynamic data from audio recordings: tempo is extracted manually, while dynamics are obtained using a psychoacoustic loudness model and a perceptually optimized smoothing algorithm.