Analysis of Rachmaninoff's Piano Performances Using Inductive Logic Programming (Extended Abstract)

The project outlined here is an attempt to use inductive logic programming ([6]) to determine various interpretative rules which the pianist, Sergei Rachmaninoff, may have used during his pianoforte performances. During the 1920's Rachmaninoff recorded a number of recitals on the Ampico Recording Piano ([4]). This method of capturing the performance not only recorded the notes, duration and tempo, but also the dynamics of the key pressure and pedalling, in a digital (in actual fact, binary) form, which easily lends itself to conversion into a computer readable form. To complement this performance information, it was also necessary to represent the musical structure of the piece being performed, so that a general analysis could be performed, rather than one specific to that particular piece. For simplicity, only the melodies of the pieces involved were subjected to analysis, although better results may be obtained from a full analysis of the accompanying harmonic and contrapuntal structures. The two sets of information, structural analysis and performance analysis were encoded into PROGOL scripts ([5]), which were used to attempt to determine general rules (in the form of universal predicates) underlying the data set. Two pieces were analysed in this manner: Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C sharp minor, opus 3 number 2 (Ampico roll number 57504) and Mendelssohn’s Song without Words Opus 67 number 4 (Ampico Roll number 59661).