Using an Expressive Performance Template in a Music Conducting Interface

This paper describes an approach for playing expressive music, as it refers to a pianist's expressiveness, with a tapping-style interface. MIDI-formatted expressive performances played by pianists were first analyzed and transformed into performance templates, in which the deviations from a canonical description was separately described for each event. Using one of the templates as a skill complement, a player can play music expressively over and under the beat level. This paper presents a scheduler that allows a player to mix her/his own intension and the expressiveness in the performance template. The results of a forty-subject user study suggest that using the expression template contributes the subject’s joy of playing music with the tapping-style performance interface. This result is also supported by a brain activation study that was done using a near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS).