Real time analysis of expressive contents in Piano performances

Musical performance introduces some deviations from nominal values specified in the score. Music reproduced without such variations is usually perceived as mechanical. Most investigations explore how the musical structure influences the performance. There are a few studies on how the musician's expressive intentions are reflected in the performance. The purpose of this work is to carry out an automatic method able to perform an analysis of the expressive content of a musical performance. Starting from this method, a software that allows a real time analysis of the expressive intention of the music performer is developed. The work is based on the model called Perceptual Parametric Space, previously developed (at CSC) starting from perceptual and acoustical analyses: a twodimensional space where each point is associated with a set of acoustic parameters that can be correlated with the expressive characteristics of a musical piece.