Inducing Rules of Ensemble Music Performance : A Machine Learning Approach

2013

Previous research in expressive music performance has described how solo musicians intuitively shape each note in relation to local/global score contexts. However, expression in ensemble performances, where each individual voice is played simultaneously with other voices, has been little explored. We present an exploratory study in which the performance of a string quartet is recorded and analysed by a computer. We use contact microphones to acquire four audio signals from which a set of audio descriptors is extracted individually for each musician. Moreover, we use motion capture to extract bowing descriptors (bow velocity/force) from each of the four performers. The gathered multimodal da…