Investigations of Between-Hand Synchronization in Magaloff's Chopin

Abstract

This article presents research towards automated computational analysis of large corpora of music performance data. In particular, we focus on betweenhand asynchronies in piano performances-an expressive device in which the performer's timing deviates from the nominally synchronized timing of the score. Between-hand asynchronies play an important role, particularly in Romantic music, but they have not been assessed quantitatively in any substantial way. We give a first report on a computational approach to analyzing a unique corpus of historic performance data: basically the complete works of Chopin, performed by the Russian-Georgian pianist Nikita Magaloff. Corpora of that size-hundreds of thousands of played notes with substantial expressive (and other) deviations from the written score-require a level of automation of analysis that has not been attained so far. We describe the required processing steps, from converting scanned scores into symbolic notation, to score-performance matching, definition, and automatic measurement of between-hand asynchronies, and a computational visualization tool for exploring and understanding the extracted information.Temporal asynchronies between the members of musical ensembles have been found to exhibit specific regularities: The principal instruments in classical wind and string trios tend to be 30-50 msec ahead of the others (Rasch 1979); soloists in jazz

onsetsync: An R Package for Onset Synchrony Analysis

“…There are also noteworthy datasets containing audio and annotated contents of music relevant to assessing synchrony such as Carnatic Music Rhythm Dataset (Srinivasamurthy et al, 2015), Hindustani Music Rhythm Dataset (Srinivasamurthy et al, 2016), Arab-Andalusian (Maghreb) dataset (Sordo et al, 2014), Scandinavian Fiddle Tunes with Accompanying Foot-Tapping (Lordelo et al, 2020) and MAESTRO (MIDI and Audio Edited for Synchronous Tracks and Organisation) dataset which is an extensive collection (200+ hours) of professional piano performances (Hawthorne et al, 2018). Some datasets such as Chopin performances compiled by Goebl et al (2010) facilitate study of the synchrony between the two hands of the pianist.…”

Las Estrategias De La Escritura Pianística. Hacia Una Pragmática De Los Textos Musicales

“…La variabilidad de valores temporales que pueden presentar figuras musicales de un mismo rango en una determinada interpretación es un hecho evidente que ha sido repetidamente examinado y, en ocasiones, medido (por ejemplo, Repp, 1998;Colomer, 2000;Nettheim, 2010;Goebl, 2001;Goebl et al 2009 El pentagrama inferior, que reproduce la imagen de una edición impresa, muestra una serie de corcheas que, teóricamente, deberían tener todas ellas la misma duración; esa isocronía ideal teórica se refleja claramente en la partitura, que presenta las distintas figuras en intervalos espaciales regulares. 173 Pero lo que de Pachmann produce a partir de ese texto, reflejado analógicamente aquí en los dos pentagramas superiores, es algo muy distinto.…”

The Magaloff Project: An Interim Report

“…As the hands of a pianist are capable of producing different musical parts independently, the temporal asynchronies between the hands may be an expressive means for the pianist. In Goebl et al (2010), we examined the between-hand asynchronies in the Magaloff corpus. The asynchronies were computed automatically over the entire corpus based on staff information contained in the score, assuming that overall the right hand played the upper staff and the left hand the lower.…”