Piano Performance Research Articles

Inertial Measurement Units and Partial Least Square Regression to Predict Perceived Exertion During Repetitive Fatiguing Piano Tasks

Aim. Predict the rate of perceived exertion (RPE) of pianists using inertial measurement units (IMUs)-based kinematic descriptors. Method. Fifty expert pianists played <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Digital</i> (right-hand 16-tone sequence) and <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Chord</i> (right-hand chord sequence) excerpts in a continuous loop for 12 min or until exhaustion. Partial least square regression was used to predict RPE with IMUs-based kinematic descriptors. The mean error of prediction over 50 iterations with five-folds cross-validation was used to assess the quality of the model. Variable importance in projection was calculated to determine the most relevant features for predicting the RPE and reduce the number of input predictors. Results. Thirty and twenty-six participants showed signs of fatigue before 12 min of the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Digital</i> and <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Chord</i> tasks, respectively, and were included in the analysis. The reduced model of 275 and 227 input variables including four-latent variables explained 86.95 ± 0.46 and 83.91 ± 0.54 of the variance of the RPE on the training set with an absolute error of 0.976 ± 0.033 and 1.189 ± 0.068 on the testing set for both <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Digital</i> and <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Chord</i> tasks, respectively. The best features, variables, and sensor positions to predict RPE were different between both <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Digital</i> and <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Chord</i> tasks suggesting a task-dependency in the prediction of effort exertion during piano performance. Conclusion. These results highlight the feasibility of continuously monitoring RPE in pianists using kinematic descriptors. These results are promising for developing methods to prevent high levels of fatigue and injuries in musicians.

Quantitative Evaluation of Piano Performance Technique and Style Based on Continuous Discretization Method

Abstract The piano education industry occupies a huge market. However, the automatic piano performance evaluation function has shortcomings in the existing piano education. In this paper, we first design a piano performance evaluation model based on the continuous discretization method for piano performance audio and improve the piano performance feature filtering and feature extraction methods through cubic spline interpolation and support vector regression, respectively. Secondly, a piano performance evaluation system based on music theory knowledge is studied to evaluate the user’s performance ability based on the rating of rhythm, main melody, and musicality performance of different levels of score performance audio and to achieve the purpose of assisting piano teaching. The results show that the difference between the scoring based on the continuous, discrete model and the actual level value of the player is less than 0.05, and the output of the evaluation system can achieve consistency; in the comparison experiments, the accuracy of three traditional evaluation models, BP, RNN, and LSTM, is 45%, 42%, and 75%, respectively, while the accuracy of the continuous, discrete model is 78%, with an average performance improvement of 23%. The continuous, discrete piano performance evaluation model proposed in this paper is more effective and objective in evaluating users’ piano performance ability and provides a guiding reference for performance evaluation in the piano education industry.

Aesthetic and physiological effects of naturalistic multimodal music listening

Compared to audio only (AO) conditions, audiovisual (AV) information can enhance the aesthetic experience of a music performance. However, such beneficial multimodal effects have yet to be studied in naturalistic music performance settings. Further, peripheral physiological correlates of aesthetic experiences are not well-understood. Here, participants were invited to a concert hall for piano performances of Bach, Messiaen, and Beethoven, which were presented in two conditions: AV and AO. They rated their aesthetic experience (AE) after each piece (Experiment 1 and 2), while peripheral signals (cardiorespiratory measures, skin conductance, and facial muscle activity) were continuously measured (Experiment 2). Factor scores of AE were significantly higher in the AV condition in both experiments. LF/HF ratio, a heart rhythm that represents activation of the sympathetic nervous system, was higher in the AO condition, suggesting increased arousal, likely caused by less predictable sound onsets in the AO condition. We present partial evidence that breathing was faster and facial muscle activity was higher in the AV condition, suggesting that observing a performer's movements likely enhances motor mimicry in these more voluntary peripheral measures. Further, zygomaticus (‘smiling’) muscle activity was a significant predictor of AE. Thus, we suggest physiological measures are related to AE, but at different levels: the more involuntary measures (i.e., heart rhythms) may reflect more sensory aspects, while the more voluntary measures (i.e., muscular control of breathing and facial responses) may reflect the liking aspect of an AE. In summary, we replicate and extend previous findings that AV information enhances AE in a naturalistic music performance setting. We further show that a combination of self-report and peripheral measures benefit a meaningful assessment of AE in naturalistic music performance settings.

Remixing Multimovement Works, Classical Music Concept Albums, and Twenty-First-Century Pianists’ Interpretations of the Canon

Nineteenth-century pianists routinely treated multimovement works—sonatas, suites, and character-piece sets—not as integral cycles but as sources of movements to excerpt, interpolate, and recombine. Exploring how five twenty-first-century pianists have adapted this practice illuminates the broader history of piano performance and the creative agency of performers invested in canonic works and ideals of Werktreue. Víkingur Ólafsson, Inon Barnatan, Alice Sara Ott, Khatia Buniatishvili, and Hélène Grimaud recombine multimovement works within the context of the concept album genre, a fixture of popular music largely unexplored within classical music. Within their opus-mixing concept albums, these pianists reinterpret the effect in performance and imagined cultural meaning of canonic repertoire. By determining an album’s track-to-track unfolding, they create original tonal, motivic, textural, and topical interrelationships and trajectories. The pianists, liner-note writers, and promoters also frame these albums with rich verbal discourses in which they assert this repertoire’s relevance and even contemporaneity for twenty-first-century listeners. Exploring these albums offers a glimpse of how performers of the classical canon navigate a twenty-first-century, digitally mediated media ecosystem. More broadly, it turns our attention to how this largely unexplored aspect of classical performance and recording shapes the way audiences encounter musical works and performers create public personae.

Retracted: Evaluation Strategy of the Piano Performance by the Deep Learning Long Short-Term Memory Network

Retracted: Evaluation Strategy of the Piano Performance by the Deep Learning Long Short-Term Memory Network

Brief biography of a Spanish pianist child prodigy of the early 20th century: María Vallès

This paper aims to find details about an excellent Spanish pianist from the beginning of the 20th century who starred when she was a little child: her name was María Vallès. Not many news are known about her brief biography since she had a short life and little could develop and become known as a pianist. Through a research work some press articles from the first decades of the 20th century were found, which highlight the excellence of her piano performances in Spain. This research was carried out according to the type of document analysis, which is one of the qualitative research types. Evidence documents regarding the prodigy phenomenon of the Spanish pianist were found. She played concerts basically in Catalonia, where she moved with her family when she was a little child. It should be also noted that she studied with one of the most prestigious pedagogues of the time, Molinari. He was her mentor and the one who introduced her to the Catalan cultural and musical life of the twenties, making her known among her peers who were also pedagogues and musicologists and the public attending her concerts. This research includes some codes for practitioners and pedagogues for the development of piano talent, in the example of Spanish pianist Maria Vallès, who was a prodigy child.

A ResNet-Based Audio-Visual Fusion Model for Piano Skill Evaluation

With the rise in piano teaching in recent years, many people have joined the ranks of piano learners. However, the high cost of traditional manual instruction and the exclusive one-on-one teaching model have made learning the piano an extravagant endeavor. Most existing approaches, based on the audio modality, aim to evaluate piano players’ skills. Unfortunately, these methods overlook the information contained in videos, resulting in a one-sided and simplistic evaluation of the piano player’s skills. More recently, multimodal-based methods have been proposed to assess the skill level of piano players by using both video and audio information. However, existing multimodal approaches use shallow networks to extract video and audio features, which limits their ability to extract complex spatio-temporal and time-frequency characteristics from piano performances. Furthermore, the fingering and pitch-rhythm information of the piano performance is embedded within the spatio-temporal and time-frequency features, respectively. Therefore, we propose a ResNet-based audio-visual fusion model that is able to extract both the visual features of the player’s finger movement track and the auditory features, including pitch and rhythm. The joint features are then obtained through the feature fusion technique by capturing the correlation and complementary information between video and audio, enabling a comprehensive and accurate evaluation of the player’s skill level. Moreover, the proposed model can extract complex temporal and frequency features from piano performances. Firstly, ResNet18-3D is used as the backbone network for our visual branch, allowing us to extract feature information from the video data. Then, we utilize ResNet18-2D as the backbone network for the aural branch to extract feature information from the audio data. The extracted video features are then fused with the audio features, generating multimodal features for the final piano skill evaluation. The experimental results on the PISA dataset show that our proposed audio-visual fusion model, with a validation accuracy of 70.80% and an average training time of 74.02 s, outperforms the baseline model in terms of performance and operational efficiency. Furthermore, we explore the impact of different layers of ResNet on the model’s performance. In general, the model achieves optimal performance when the ratio of video features to audio features is balanced. However, the best performance achieved is 68.70% when the ratio differs significantly.

Acute Neuromuscular Fatigability and Perceived Exertion in High-Level University Pianists: An Electromyography and Maximum Force Capacity Study.

Musicians are labelled 'fine motor athletes' due to the significant demands of practice and performance. In response, sports medical concepts and expertise have been adapted and mobilized to address musicians' health considerations. However, understanding distinct differences between the sports and performing arts medical contexts is critical. Mismanagement of fatigue and acute fatigability are identified as key risk factors for deleterious symptoms and injuries in musicians. Acute fatigability in athletes and musicians have been assumed to occur similarly, although this has yet to be empirically demonstrated. This study aimed to evaluate acute muscular performance fatigability during piano performance of varied intensities. Fourteen university pianists attended a single experimental session and performed three pieces of randomly ordered repertoire for 10 minutes each. Repertoire were self-selected to be physically easy (rating of perceived exertion [RPE] 9/20), somewhat hard (RPE 13/20), or hard (RPE 17/20). At baseline, after each repertoire performance, and following a concluding 10-minute silent sitting period, participants completed maximum voluntary contraction (MVC) grip and shoulder strength tests. Surface electromyographic (EMG) data were obtained from bilateral upper trapezius and forearm flexor and extensor muscles. Data were analyzed using uni- and multivariate repeated measures analyses of variance (ANOVAs). No evidence of muscular performance fatigability was found in study pianists at any intensity. Mean EMG amplitude and average median EMG frequency did not significantly vary during any repertoire performances or MVC tests (F≤1.72; p>0.09). Additionally, no changes in force or EMG parameters were found during any MVC tests (F≤1.19; p>0.31). The absence of muscular performance fatigability during even the most intense piano performances suggests substantially differing mechanisms of fatigability and perceived exertion in pianists versus those commonly seen in sport athletes. Further research is needed to understand the mechanisms of acute fatigability in musicians and develop musician-specific management strategies.

Development of Piano Performing Art in China in the 20th Century

The author has raised the questions and elaborated her opinions on a basis of the literatures and documentations screened and collated by the author in respect of piano education and performance in China in the 20th century. This paper is written as a literature review. The development and achievements in piano education and performance in China has been discussed stage by stage in the 20th century. This will provide theoretical basis for the application of such achievements in one’s own piano performance and teaching practices. It is known from the literatures being researched that various piano schools in the world in the 20th century have affected the development of piano performing art in China in respect of piano playing. The remarkable outcomes of these schools have been widely referred to in China. As a result, a piano school with the characteristics of Chinese nation and art of music has gradually come into being. A large number of Chinese native remarkable pianists have been cultivated. So far more of the literatures available in China are on piano education and less on piano performance theories. The researches on piano performance mainly focus on a specific work of art. It is even rare to find any literature on a combination of piano education and piano performance.

Research on the Performance Style of Baroque Keyboard Music

This Article aimed to study (1) How to understand and interpret the style of Baroque keyboard music (2) What are the performance characteristics of the harpsichord and piano in Baroque keyboard music. To ensure the objectivity, authenticity, and general validity of the findings, the population sample for this study was selected from piano students, piano teachers, experts, and scholars in music colleges and universities in different regions of China. Receipts were collected by administering a reliability-compliant questionnaire to population sample, and the data were analyzed by SPSS. Analysis data by Descriptive statistics and Content Analysis. The research results were found as follows;An understanding and interpretation of Baroque keyboard music style should include the following elements: instruments, scores, historical perspective, players, and performance techniques 2. The harpsichord mainly relies on the sound plug to adjust its timbre and volume, which makes it impossible to play the extended tone. The playing technique has more decorative tones added. In order to express the Baroque style, piano performance also requires retaining some of the playing skills of the harpsichord.

The influence of executive functions on eye-hand span and piano performance during sight-reading.

The ability to perform an unrehearsed piece of music, or sight-read, is a skill required by music performers. In sight-reading, the performer reads and plays the music simultaneously, which requires the coordination of visual, auditory, and motor processing. While performing, they display a characteristic called eye-hand span, in which the part of the score being looked at precedes the part being played. They must recognize, decipher, and process the score in the time between reading a note and playing it. An individual's executive function (EF) that control their cognition, emotions, and behavior may be involved in overseeing these individual movements. However, no study has investigated how EF is related to the eye-hand span and performance during sight-reading. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to clarify the relationships among EF, eye-hand span, and piano performance. Thirty-nine Japanese pianists and college students aspiring to be pianists with an average of 33.3 years of experience participated in this study. They performed sight-reading of two types of music scores with different difficulty levels while their eye movements were measured using an eye tracker to obtain their eye-hand span. The core EFs of inhibition, working memory, and shifting, were measured directly for each participant. Piano performance was evaluated by two pianists who did not participate in the study. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze the results. The results showed that auditory working memory predicted eye-hand span (β = .73, p < .001 in easy score; β = .65, p < .001 in difficult score), and eye-hand span predicted performance (β = .57, p < .001 in easy score; β = .56, p < .001 in difficult score). Auditory working memory did not directly affect performance, but through eye-hand span. The eye-hand span for easy scores was significantly greater than that for difficult scores. Furthermore, in a difficult music score, the shifting ability predicted higher piano performance. These suggest that the input of notes from the eyes becomes sound in the brain and activates the auditory working memory, which is then transmitted to finger movement, resulting in piano performance. In addition, it was suggested that shifting ability is also needed to perform difficult scores.

Esteticheskie idei prepodavaniya fortepiannoj igry v vuzah s pozicii filosofii iskusstva

This article aims to explore the aesthetic thinking of piano performance teaching in universities under the vision of artistic philosophy, with a view to improving the aesthetic perception and appreciation ability of contemporary college students, cultivating students' artistic thinking, and promoting the integration of performance skills and emotions.

Automatic Assessment of Piano Performances Using Timbre and Pitch Features

To assist piano learners with the improvement of their skills, this study investigates techniques for automatically assessing piano performances based on timbre and pitch features. The assessment is formulated as a classification problem that classifies piano performances as “Good”, “Fair”, or “Poor”. For timbre-based approaches, we propose timbre-based WaveNet, timbre-based MLNet, Timbre-based CNN, and Timbre-based CNN Transformers. For pitch-based approaches, we propose Pitch-based CNN and Pitch-based CNN Transformers. Our experiments indicate that both Pitch-based CNN and Pitch-based CNN Transformers are superior to the timbre-based approaches, which attained classification accuracies of 96.87% and 97.5%, respectively.

Lectio praecursoria: Kuusi soivaa näkökulmaa 1920-luvun ranskalaiseen modernismiin

Six sounding aspects on the 1920s French Modernism&#x0D; In her lectio praecursoria, Doctor of Music Eveliina Sumelius-Lindblom gives her artistic doctoral project “Four aspects on French Modernism: from l’esprit nouveau towards the world of colors and the performer’s methodological thinking” a general picture in which the historical, aesthetic and performer-based aspects encounter themselves. In addition to introducing the key concepts of the 1920s French Modernism and highlighting its general aesthetic atmosphere Sumelius-Lindblom focuses on those research results which are most obviously attached to her long-term artistic experience on playing the piano repertoire of this period. The six solo piano performances of the composers of Les Six -group (Georges Auric, Arthur Honegger and Darius Milhaud), Arnold Schoenberg, Olivier Messiaen and Igor Stravinsky not only give a versatile and multi-valued sounding picture of the 1920s Modernism. The piano performances also work as a fundamental part of Sumelius-Lindblom’s intersubjective research practice in which showing and verifying the research findings by playing represent the other main focus of her research.

China's First Recital and Recording Pianist Ding Shande: A Critical Examination of His Performing Career and Performance Style

AbstractMusical biography, particularly that which focuses on non-Western performers, has long been marginalized in musicology. This article critically examines the performing career and performance style of China's first recital and recording pianist, Ding Shande, by scrutinizing written documents and analysing recordings. It was found that Ding's performing career was short-lived, peaking in 1935 and ending in the 1950s, and that he tended to play with fast and even tempo, emphasize metrical organizations, and highlight structural divisions through long-range dynamic variation. These findings shed light on how the changing concept of semi-colonialism influenced the career trajectories and performance styles of the earliest Chinese pianists, and hence offer insights into early history of piano performance in China. This article shows that performers’ performances are just as important in biographical writings as is the story of their lives, and that interweaving the two helps develop a more thorough and comprehensive understanding of a performer's biography.

Performance Analysis of the Piano Work “Three Lanes of Plum Blossoms” Exploration

The piano work “Three Lanes of Plum Blossoms” is a representative piano adaptation of Wang Jianzhong. It was composed in the 1970s and has certain originality in its composition techniques. From the perspective of a pianist, this article will compare the technical differences between guqin performance and piano performance from the perspective of the creation background, musical structure, and timbre performance of the work, and conduct research and analysis on the technical skills of the work. Sharing from it makes the interpretation of the work more perfect.

The Role of the Piano in Romanticism Approached by Serbian Composers

Serbian piano literature can be divided, quite meaningfully, into several categories if one takes into account the classification criteria: a) the origin of the compositions, b) the level of their content and c) the level of success of the piano performance. Piano performance survived for several decades as the only form of creative expression of Serbian citizens.

Výsledky kvalitatívneho výskumu kauzálnych súvislostí medzi klavírnou interpretáciou pedagóga a percepčnými zručnosťami žiakov v mladšom školskom veku

The piano performance as a way of direct and live performance of a musical work has become the subject of many research studies which deal primarily on its artistic application. The article introduces a qualitative research of the teacher´s piano performance in relation to the acquisition of perceptual skills with an effort to take into account the specificities and benefits of piano performance in the context of the didactic practices of the music-pedagogical concept of Juraj Hatrik in primary musical education. The article reflects the description and results of the qualitative research realised by means of a multiple-case study – causal relation between the teacher's piano performance and perceptual skills of young learners.

Research on Solfeggio Teaching Method for Piano Performance Teaching in Colleges and Universities

This study aimed to examine the impact of sight-singing and ear-training training on piano performance education. The study involved 30 participants, and data were collected through pre-test and post-test assessments, as well as feedback from participants' piano instructors. The results showed a significant improvement in participants' sight-singing and ear-training ability after one year of training. Furthermore, there was a correlation between participants' sight-singing and ear-training ability and their piano performance ability, with a significant improvement in technical proficiency and musicality observed in those who improved their sight-singing and ear-training ability.

Retracted: Application of 5G Internet of Things Multisensor Information Fusion Model in Piano Performance

Retracted: Application of 5G Internet of Things Multisensor Information Fusion Model in Piano Performance