Analysis of piano performance using an eigenperformance
Masanobu Miura · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2016
Analysis of piano performance has been a great task for musicologists, in particular the “artistic deviation” on performance has been intensively discussed. Introduced here is a method to clarify what occurs on music performance by observing the eigenvector of obtained several piano playings, “Eigenperformance.” The eigenperformance is obtained for MIDI-piano playing from the tendency of onset, MIDI-velocity, duration, and instantaneous tempo curves. Eigenperformance is possible to indicate tendencies for a set of piano playing. By using eigenperformance, here investigates 1) the differences in evaluation criteria between pianists and non-pianists, and 2) the differences of deviations due to player’s skill. For 1), results of simple scale performance show that pianists evaluate short and sudden tempo changes with taking long time in ending notes along with dynamic and temporal expressions based on phrases on sheet music as good, whereas non-pianists never provide such evaluation. For 2), piano etude “For Elise” is dealt with to be investigated by four classes of proficiency. The eigenperformance revealed that the proficient performance shows same patterns of dynamics among first and second sections in sheet music, whereas the novice performance does not show any analogous on corresponding parts in sheet music.