Evidence for Pianist-specific Rubato Style in Chopin Nocturnes

The performance of music usually involves a great deal of interpretation by the musician. In classical music, the final ritardando is a good example of the expressive aspect of music performance. Even though expressive timing data is expected to have a strong component that is determined by the piece itself, in this paper we investigate to what degree individual performance style has an effect on the timing of final ritardandi. The particular approach taken here uses Friberg and Sundberg’s kinematic rubato model in order to characterize performed ritardandi. Using a machinelearning classifier, we carry out a pianist identification task to assess the suitability of the data for characterizing the individual playing style of pianists. The results indicate that in spite of an extremely reduced data representation, when cancelling the piece-specific aspects, pianists can often be identified with accuracy above baseline. This fact suggests the existence of a performer-specific style of playing ritardandi.