A state of the art on computational music performance

Abstract

Musical expressivity can be defined as the deviation from a musical standard when a score is performed by a musician. This deviation is made in terms of intrinsic note attributes like pitch, timbre, timing and dynamics. The advances in computational power capabilities and digital sound synthesis have allowed real-time control of synthesized sounds. Expressive control becomes then an area of great interest in the sound and music computing field. Musical expressivity can be approached from different perspectives. One approach is the musicological analysis of music and the study of the different stylistic schools. This approach provides a valuable understanding about musical expressivity. Another perspective is the computational modelling of music performance by means of automatic analysis of recordings. It is known that music performance is a complex activity that involves complementary aspects from other disciplines such as psychology and acoustics. It requires creativity and eventually, some manual abilities, being a hard task even for humans. Therefore, using machines appears as a very interesting and fascinating issue. In this paper, we present an overall view of the works many researchers have done so far in the field of expressive music performance, with special attention to the computational approach.