Extracting heterogeneous structured features from music performance

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

In music performance, the musician adds artistic expressive elements beyond the information contained in conventional western music scores. As micro-fluctuations these expressive dimensions convey emotions and essential interpretative information and can be measured and compared quantitatively, over large and small scales, and evaluated for their effect on aspects of the performance. We present a heterogeneous expressive music feature description that include both inter-note features that extend over musical phrases composed of several notes, and intra-note features that represent the internal variations within each musical note. The intra-note features include pitch and pitch deviation, dynamic level, timber, articulation and vibrato. The inter-note features include timing and dynamics, as well as timber, pitch deviation, articulation, and vibrato extending across multiple notes and musical phrases. A complete multi-dimensional feature description for every note is unnecessary because there is a hierarch...