Timbre is an essential expressive feature in piano performance. Concert pianists use a vast palette of timbral nuances to color their performances at the microstructural level. Although timbre is generally envisioned in the pianistic community as an abstract concept carried through an imaged vocabulary, performers may share some common strategies of timbral expression in piano performance. Yet there may remain further leeway for idiosyncratic processes in the production of piano timbre nuances. In this study, we examined the patterns of timbral expression in performances by four expert pianists. Each pianist performed four short pieces, each with five different timbral intentions (bright, dark, dry, round, and velvety). The performances were recorded with the high-accuracy Bösendorfer CEUS system. Fine-grained performance features of dynamics, touch, articulation and pedaling were extracted. Reduced PCA performance spaces and descriptive performance portraits confirmed that pianists exhibited unique, specific profiles for different timbral intentions, derived from underlying traits of general individuality, while sharing some broad commonalities of dynamics and articulation for each timbral intention. These results confirm that pianists' abstract notions of timbre correspond to reliable patterns of performance technique. Furthermore, these effects suggest that pianists can express individual styles while complying with specific timbral intentions.

Congenital amusia is a lifelong disorder of music processing that has been ascribed to impaired pitch perception and memory. The present study tested a large group of amusics (n=17) and provided evidence that their pitch deficit affects pitch processing in speech to a lesser extent: Fine-grained pitch discrimination was better in spoken syllables than in acoustically matched tones. Unlike amusics, control participants performed fine-grained pitch discrimination better for musical material than for verbal material. These findings suggest that pitch extraction can be influenced by the nature of the material (music vs speech), and that amusics' pitch deficit is not restricted to musical material, but extends to segmented speech events.

Muscle fatigue is considered as a risk factor for developing playing-related muscular disorders among professional pianists and could affect musical performance. This study investigated in 50 pianists the effect of fatiguing repetitive piano sequences on the development of forearm muscle fatigue and on piano performance parameters. Results showed signs of myoelectric manifestation of fatigue in the 42-electromyographic bipolar electrodes positioned on the forearm to record finger and wrist flexor and extensor muscles, through a significant non-constant decrease of instantaneous median frequency during two repetitive Digital (right-hand 16-tones sequence) and Chord (right-hand chords sequence) excerpts, with extensor muscles showing greater signs of fatigue than flexor muscles. In addition, muscle fatigue negatively affected key velocity, a central feature of piano sound intensity, in both Digital and Chord excerpts, and note-events, a fundamental aspect of musicians’ performance parameter, in the Chord excerpt only. This result highlights that muscle fatigue may alter differently pianists’ musical performance according to the characteristics of the piece played.

Trunk-Motion, Touch, and Articulation in Piano Performance contributed to creating forward linear velocities at the upper limb. The reported findings have implications for the performance, teaching, and research domains since they provide evidence of how pianists' trunk motion can actively contribute to the sound production and might not only be associated with either postural or expressive features.