Automatic Assessment of Sight-reading Exercises
Jiawen Huang, Alexander Lerch · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2019
Sight-reading requires a musician to decode, process, and perform a musical score quasi-instantaneously and without rehearsal. Due to the complexity of this task, it is difficult to assess the proficiency of a sight-reading performance, and it is even more challenging to model its human assessment. This study aims at evaluating and identifying effective features for automatic assessment of sight-reading performance. The evaluated set of features comprises task-specific, hand-crafted, and interpretable features designed to represent various aspect of sight-reading performance covering parameters such as intonation, timing, dynamics, and score continuity. The most relevant features are identified by Principal Component Analysis and forward feature selection. For context, the same features are also applied to the assessment of rehearsed student music performances and compared across different assessment categories. The results show potential of automatic assessment models for sight-reading and the relevancy of different features as well as the contribution of different feature groups to different assessment categories.