Single Piano Research Articles

Improving piano music signal recognition through enhanced frequency domain analysis

Feature extraction is a crucial component in the analysis of piano music signals. This article introduced three methods for feature extraction based on frequency domain analysis, namely short-time Fourier transform (STFT), linear predictive cepstral coefficient (LPCC), and Mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC). An improvement was then made to the MFCC. The inverse MFCC (IMFCC) was combined with mid-frequency MFCC (MidMFCC). The Fisher criterion was used to select the 12-order parameters with the maximum Fisher ratio, which were combined into the F-MFCC feature for recognizing 88 single piano notes through a support vector machine. The results indicated that when compared with the STFT and LPCC, the MFCC exhibited superior performance in recognizing piano music signals, with an accuracy rate of 78.03 % and an F1 value of 85.92 %. Nevertheless, the proposed F-MFCC achieved a remarkable accuracy rate of 90.91 %, representing a substantial improvement by 12.88 % over the MFCC alone. These findings provide evidence for the effectiveness of the designed F-MFCC feature for piano music signal recognition as well as its potential application in practical music signal analysis.

Effect of inharmonicity on pitch perception and subjective tuning of piano tones

The consensus in piano tuning philosophy explains the stretched tuning scale by the inharmonicity of piano strings. This study aimed to examine how variable inharmonicity influences the result of the piano tuning process, compare the tuning curves of aurally tuned pianos with the curves derived from subjective octave enlargement experiments, and evaluate whether the pitches of inharmonic or harmonic versions of the same tone are perceived differently. In addition, the influence of strings of other piano keys on the measured inharmonicity of a single piano string was investigated. The inharmonicity of all individual strings was measured on a Steinway D grand piano. Variable inharmonicity was implemented by additive synthesis with frequency-adjusted sinusoidal partials. Fifteen piano tuners and 18 orchestra musicians participated in the experiments. The results indicate that the inharmonic piano tones produced a keyboard tuning curve similar to the Railsback curve and differed significantly from the harmonic counterpart. The inharmonic tuning curve was reminiscent of the subjective octave enlargement curve. Inharmonic tone pitches were perceived to be higher than harmonic tones up to C ♯ 7. The covibrating strings of the other keys did not exhibit any meaningful effect on the measured inharmonicity of a single string of the played key.

Neural multimodal integration underlying synchronization with a co-performer in music: Influences of motor expertise and visual information

Sensorimotor synchronization is a general skill that musicians have developed to the highest levels of performance, including synchronization in timing and articulation. This study investigated neurocognitive processes that enable such high levels of performance, specifically testing the relevance of 1) motor resonance and sharing high levels of motor expertise with the co-performer, and 2) the role of visual information in addition to auditory information. Musicians with varying levels of piano expertise (including non-pianists) performed on a single piano key with their right hand along with recordings of a pianist who performed simple melodies with the left hand, synchronizing timing and articulation. The prerecorded performances were presented as audio-only, audio-video, or audio-animation stimuli. Double pulse Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (dTMS) was applied to test the contribution of the right dorsal premotor cortex (dPMC), an area implicated in motor resonance with observed (left-hand) actions, and the contribution of the right intraparietal sulcus (IPS), an area known for multisensory binding. Results showed effects of dTMS in the conditions that included visual information. IPS stimulation improved synchronization, although this effect was found to reverse in the video condition with higher levels of piano expertise. dPMC stimulation improved or worsened synchronization ability. Level of piano expertise was found to influence this direction in the video condition. These results indicate that high levels of relevant motor expertise are required to beneficially employ visual and motor information of a co-performer for sensorimotor synchronization, which may qualify the effects of dPMC and IPS involvement.

Measurement and numerical simulation of two-dimensional vibration of a single piano string

A piano string begins to vibrate vertically as soon as a hammer strikes it. After the vertical vibration has begun, the string then starts to rotate owing to the generation of horizontal vibration. The rotation direction changes several seconds later, which suggests that the frequencies of the vertical and horizontal components of the vibration are slightly different. We previously reported an equivalent mechanical circuit model for physically elucidating such two-dimensional movements of the string. In this presentation, we show the verification and validation of the equivalent model by comparing with experiments. The movements of a string in low frequencies were observed using a high-speed camera and a mirror. In order to increase the measurement accuracy of displacement, interpolation technique was applied to the correlation of recorded images. It was noted that the frequency of a partial vibration of the string in the vertical direction is higher or lower than that in the horizontal direction to the s...

Octave Bias in Pitch Perception: The Influence of Pitch Height on Pitch Class Identification.

Pitch height and pitch class are different, but strictly related, percepts of music tones. To investigate the influence of pitch height in a pitch class identification task, we systematically analyzed the errors-in terms of direction and amount-committed by a group of musicians. The aim of our study was to verify the existence of constant errors in the identification of pitch classes across consecutive octaves. Stimuli were single piano tones from the C major scale executed in two consecutive octaves. Participants showed different response patterns in the two octaves. The direction of errors revealed a constant tendency to underestimate pitch classes in the lowest octave and to overestimate pitch classes in the highest octave. Thus, pitch height showed to influence pitch class identification. We called this bias "pitch class polarization", since the same pitch class was judged to be respectively lower and higher, depending on relatively low or high pitch height.

Theoretical analysis of two-dimensional vibration of single piano string using equivalent mechanical circuit models

Theoretical analysis of two-dimensional vibration of single piano string using equivalent mechanical circuit models

Jade God In

The work "˜Jade God In' for solo piano is a working in progress in which the aim is to research different sonorities coming from a single piano gesture: the arpeggios. From the timbral point of view on the work this particular music technique is the support tool for brightness and darkness sonorities. The work is dedicated to the Brazilian composer Felipe Ribeiro and the Greek pianist and composer Ermis Theodorakis performed it.

A Camera-Based Music-Making Tool for Physical Rehabilitation

The universality of music among human cultures as well as our common experience of naturally responding to music with motion, seem to be widely recognized (Tramo 2001). Recent brain-imaging studies (Lahav et al. 2005; Lahav, Saltzman, and Schlaug 2007) show that humans, given appropriate auditory inputs, seem to be tuned to produce corresponding motor outputs. This unique auditorymotor interplay provides the conceptual basis for the use of music therapy, in particular, active music therapy, where a patient is physically involved in producing music rather than simply reacting to or accompanying music (Pacchetti et al. 2000; Paul and Ramsey 2000; Lahav 2005). Music therapy has benefited people with physical disabilities, mental health needs, developmental and learning disabilities, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, autism, substance abuse problems, brain injuries, and acute and chronic pain (Pacchetti et al. 2000; Harris and Summa-Chadwick 2005; see also the American Music Therapy Association's Web site, www.musictherapy.org). Playing an instrument, such as piano, guitar, or drums, may be very difficult or even inf easible for patients with motor dysfunctions. As an alternative, easy-to-use tool for active music therapy, we designed Music M ker, a human-computer interface that converts body movements into musical and visual feedback in real time using the open software platform EyesWeb (Camurri et al. 2004). Music Maker is a non-obtrusive camera-based tool that allows physically impaired patients to naturally create music with no prior musical training. Patients simply move their hand or foot in space or on a surface, and Music Maker detects and interprets these movements. Detection is accomplished without any sensors or markers that must be attached to the patients' bodies. Music Maker relies only on the video input from a camera to observe patient motion and on computervision techniques to analyze the motion. Music Maker is an adaptive interface that can be adjusted to provide auditory and visual feedback based on the patient's needs and interests. Auditory feedback could range from a single piano note to a recording of the patient's favorite piece of music. Visual feedback is provided by a graphical display on a computer monitor or wall-mounted screen. Music Maker uses fun displays, for example, cartoon drawings or pictures of musical instruments. Its hardware setup can be adjusted according to patients' levels of impairment, their particular therapeutic goals, and the equipment available in hospitals or patients' homes. (See Figure 1 for sample setups.) Computer Music Journal, 31:2, pp. 39-53, Summer 2007 © 2007 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Baseball Film to 1920

Every motion picture is a time capsule, a moment in the life of a culture. But unless it is two minutes or ten hours long and non-narrative-in other words, decidedly non-commercial-a film is usually produced for one purpose: to make money. In this regard, a motion picture is no different from an automobile, a roll of bathroom tissue, or a can of beer. This profit motive also explains why, in the parlance of the business, individual films are referred to as product.Motion pictures that feature baseball-related settings have been produced since the late 1890s and early 1900s, when moviegoing was as novel as watching television was in 1950 or renting movies on videotape was in 1985. From the very beginning, baseball was depicted in motion pictures primarily because of the burgeoning popularity of the sport. It made sense to filmmakers that fans of the game would fork over their hard-earned nickels to gaze at comedies or dramas depicting speedballing hurlers, ninth-inning heroics, and likable underdogs triumphing against the odds. In particular, in this era before the advent of radio and television, motion pictures allowed moviegoers-especially those who lived outside the major league cities-to see and admire the baseball stars they only could read about in newspapers or hear about while chatting with their cronies at the corner barbershop. Such films generally were newsreels spotlighting major leaguers, or one- and two-reelers featuring ballplayers in what were little more than cameo appearances, or highly fictionalized biographical features in which scenarists transformed ballplayers into fairy-tale heroes. Whether in a story that was fact or fiction, however, seeing Ty Cobb or Babe Ruth up-close on a movie screen in 1917 or 1920 must have been a transcendent experience for the average baseball fan.Despite their growing popularity, motion pictures still were dwarfed by as the most popular form of mass entertainment. On November 8, 1908, the Washington Post described a polite vaudeville program, to be presented at Chase's theater. The bill included Lasky's Viennese production, Love Waltz,' with Alfred Kappeler and Audrey Maple ... Laddie Cliff, the English boy comedian ... Will H. Fox, fresh from London triumphs, in his new single piano act; the Young American Five; the Five Jordans, and so on. The final entertainment cited was a film: 'The Baseball Fan' by the American vitagraph.Yet the storylines found in the earliest baseball films, and the manner in which they portray ballplayers and fans, serve to mirror the now long-extinct American culture before 1920: a time of innocence, a pre-Jazz Age America that was a nation of small towns and small-town types. The prevailing view was that the simplicity of rural life was preferable to the corrupting ways of the metropolis. It was an era when filmmakers could celebrate a pastoral America whose foundation was Victorian morality, while emphasizing the notion that leaving the farm for the city meant going off in search of sin.Whether on purpose or by accident, baseball-playing characters were depicted in such milieus-and their on-field exploits were blended into standard plotlines featuring plainspoken Good Guys who win their true love while fending off one-dimensionally evil villains. If baseball truly was America's national pastime, such baseball players were ideal all-American heroes. Their honesty and good intentions aside, however, it was their onfield exploits that made them lastingly heroic. Before a new reality set in, that of flaming youth and bathtub gin, the Black Sox Scandal and the Roaring Twenties, baseball movies could lovingly-and believably-chart the comic antics of fans attempting to enjoy ballgames despite their bullying bosses or unsympathetic wives, or weave the stories of rural whammers or flamethrowers who overcome obstacles, perform storybook heroics, and win the love of the demure, true-blue heroine while spurning the entreaties of villains to cheat on the field. …

Persistent Responsiveness of Long-Latency Auditory Cortical Activities in Response to Repeated Stimuli of Musical Timbre and Vowel Sounds

Long-latency auditory-evoked magnetic field and potential show strong attenuation of N1m/N1 responses when an identical stimulus is presented repeatedly due to adaptation of auditory cortical neurons. This adaptation is weak in subsequently occurring P2m/P2 responses, being weaker for piano chords than single piano notes. The adaptation of P2m is more suppressed in musicians having long-term musical training than in nonmusicians, whereas the amplitude of P2 is enhanced preferentially in musicians as the spectral complexity of musical tones increases. To address the key issues of whether such high responsiveness of P2m/P2 responses to complex sounds is intrinsic and common to nonmusical sounds, we conducted a magnetoencephalographic study on participants who had no experience of musical training, using consecutive trains of piano and vowel sounds. The dipole moment of the P2m sources located in the auditory cortex indicated significantly suppressed adaptation in the right hemisphere both to piano and vowel sounds. Thus, the persistent responsiveness of the P2m activity may be inherent, not induced by intensive training, and common to spectrally complex sounds. The right hemisphere dominance of the responsiveness to musical and speech sounds suggests analysis of acoustic features of object sounds to be a significant function of P2m activity.

Communicating expressive intentions with a single piano note

We analysed how expressive intentions are communicated and perceived in a special context of musical production: improvisation on a single piano note. Two experiments were designed in order to find relations between performer's expressive intentions, four acoustical parameters (pitch, intensity, articulation and rhythmic density), and listener's perception of expressive content. Differences between musicians and non-musicians were analysed as well. In the first experiment, 6 performers (3 musicians and 3 non-musicians) improvised on a digital piano according to 8 expressive intentions. The experiment was planned in 4 phases, progressively limiting the musical means available to the performer. In all phases, improvisations were limited to only one piano note. In the second experiment, listeners described performer's improvisations by means of adjective ratings. Results support the position that few low level parameters, mainly intensity and rhythmic density, are important factors in the communication of expressive content from the performer to the listener and that listeners recognize most expressive intentions even when very few acoustical parameters are used.

Two-dimensional motion of a single piano string

Two-dimensional motion of a piano string has been observed. When the hammer moves to strike the string, the irregularity of the surface causes horizontal as well as vertical vibration of the string. It has been thought that the vertical and the horizontal vibration dominates, respectively, the prompt and after sound of a piano [G. Weinreich, Sci. Am. 240, 118–127 (1979)]. An apparatus was made to observe the two-dimensional motion, assembling two optical fibers and two phototransistors. The wrapped single string E1 was measured with this equipment. The following results were found. (1) The amplitudes of the horizontal and vertical vibrations repeat, increasing and decreasing during the after sound. This means the sound is formed by the coupling of both vibrations, which occurs at the inclined pins of the bridge. (2) When the string is struck by the hammer, it vibrates at first vertically to the soundboard and then, after few seconds, it starts to rotate. The direction of the rotation changes alternately about every 6 s. (3) The first direction of the rotation is not determined. It depends on how one touches the key. This means the touch may change the piano timbre.

Ballet on British television, 1946–1947: Starting again

Ballet has always had a recognized place in television programming in Britain, not just from the opening of the official BBC television service in November 1936, but from the time of the unofficial experimental service that took its first faltering steps in 1932. It developed from being able to show only soloists, dancing in front of a plain white backcloth on a checkered floor accompanied by a single piano, through duets, trios, small groups with instrumental ensembles and simple scenery, and specially created ballets, to a two-act version of The Sleeping Princess (or Beauty, as it is usually known), featuring sixty dancers from the Vic-Wells Ballet. The service closed down in September 1939, on the eve of the outbreak in Europe of World War II, and remained closed for the duration. Before the war, ballet and television in Britain had developed side by side, but after the close-down, television obviously made no further effective progress, while ballet surged ahead. Until the war, ballet was seen only rarely outside London, but the war played havoc with London theatres and theatregoing so that touring became the order of the day. The Sadler's Wells

Intact Absolute Pitch Ability After Left Temporal Lobectomy

A 17-year old pianist who possessed absolute pitch underwent an anterior left temporal lobectomy for the relief of intractable seizures. Prior to surgery he showed some fluctuation in the pattern of errors in notating single piano tones. Postoperatively he improved on this task, and one year later his performance was essentially perfect. On a short-term retention task given postoperatively he showed the expected effect of a left temporal-lobe and hippocampal lesion: he was impaired in the recall of a three-letter sequence after 18 sec with an interpolated verbal task. In contrast, retention of the names of three piano notes was excellent under the same conditions, as it is for control subjects with absolute pitch. The results are interpreted in terms of the dissociation between verbal mechanisms and those involved in the coding of pitch, and the seeming immunity of many musical abilities to the effects of left-hemisphere lesions.

Multiple voice electric piano and method

An electric piano has a complete player actuated piano voice of which harmonics are basically controlled by a tuning fork that is struck by the piano key. The piano is also provided with an electronically generated voice of which harmonics are electronically generated. To better enable the two voices to be played simultaneously by striking a single piano key, the amplitude envelope of the electromechanically generated piano voice is imposed upon the electronically generated voice which is gated and amplitude modulated so as to be heard in precise synchronization with a piano note produced by the instrument player. Linearity of modulation is extended to low piano voice amplitudes by use of modulating and gating diodes in oppositely poled feedback paths of an operational amplifier.

Measurement of decay curves of individual partials of singly excited piano and harpsichord strings

Curves of relative sound-pressure level versus time for low-order partials (typically up to the fourth) of single piano strings have been obtained. A wide dynamic range contributes to the recognition of a number of characteristic forms which can be related to physical attributes of the piano. These forms appear to be essentially equivalent to forms obtained for the relative energy transmission to the bridge by a two-string system [G. Weinreich, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 62, 1479 (1977)]. Beats between the two polarizations of each partial are frequently observed, but occur much less often on good pianos in good condition than on other instruments. This suggests the use of these measurements as an indicator of piano quality. Measurements on harpsichords show that beating of the upper partials is the rule rather than the exception [cf. R. W. Pyle, Jr. and T. J. Schultz. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 39, 1220(A) (1966)], raising the question of what it means to tune these instruments, particularly when the subtleties of different temperaments are involved. Work is in progress to make quantitative comparison with theoretical curves. [Work supported by NSF.]

Observations on the Vibrations of Piano Strings

The behavior of single piano strings struck in their normal positions was investigated through measurement of the frequencies of the partials and their amplitudes as functions of time after striking. Three-dimensional figures showing partial amplitudes versus time are presented. The frequencies of the partials of the tone were found to be those of the normal modes of vibration and are therefore referred to as the modal frequencies of the string. The higher modal frequencies are progressively sharp with respect to true harmonics of the fundamental; the sharpening follows approximately a square law with respect to mode number, to the extent that in one case the 15th partial had just about the frequency of a 16th harmonic. The resulting inharmonicity in piano strings is least in the two octaves below middle C; it rises sharply at the high end and more or less sharply at the low end, depending upon the type of piano. A correlation between inharmonicity and subjective tone quality rating is suggested. It is shown that the commonly observed “stretched” tuning (sharpening of the treble, flattening the bass) is a natural consequence of the inharmonicity.