Performances by soloists in the Western classical tradition are normally highly prepared, yet must sound fresh and spontaneous. How do musicians manage this? We tested the hypothesis that they achieve the necessary spontaneity by varying the musical gestures that express their interpretation of a piece. We examined the tempo arches produced by final slowing at the ends of phrases in performance...

This paper explores the effect musical context, namely key and tempo, on audio onset detection using machine learning techniques, with a focus on the changes in performance caused by mismatched key and tempo between training and test pieces, and the potential benefits of incorporating such musical information. We extract frequency energy information from audio as the input instance attributes f...

This study addressed the question of whether the expressive microstructure of a music performance remains relationally invariant across moderate (musically acceptable) changes in tempo. Two pianists played Schumann's "Träumerei" three times at each of three tempi on a digital piano, and the performance data were recorded in MIDI format. In a perceptual test, musically trained listeners attempte...

In this paper we introduce the Smart Tempo-Spatial Hotspots Finder (Smart-TSH-Finder) for smart data crawling in the Second Life (SL) virtual world. Classical methods of crawling data from SL lead to irrelevant data content because of the dynamic nature of avatars and objects in SL. In order to build artificially intelligent expert avatar agents that are able to provide intelligent services for...

This paper presents an algorithm that extracts the tempo of a musical excerpt. The proposed system assumes a constant tempo and deals directly with the audio signal. A sliding window is applied to the signal and two feature classes are extracted. The first class is the log-energy of each band of a mel-scale triangular filterbank, a common feature vector used in various MIR applications. For the...

Physical prowess is associated with rapid recovery from exhaustion. Here we examined whether recovery from aerobic exercise could be manipulated with a rhythmic sound pattern that either decreased or increased in tempo. Six men and six women exercised repeatedly for six minutes on a cycle ergometer at 60 percent of their individual maximal oxygen consumption, and then relaxed for six minutes wh...

A performance of a piece of music heavily depends on the musician’s or conductor’s individual vision and personal interpretation of the given musical score. As basis for the analysis of artistic idiosyncrasies, one requires accurate annotations that reveal the exact timing and intensity of the various note events occurring in the performances. In the case of audio recordings, this annotation is...

A method is presented for the rhythmic parsing problem: Given a sequence of observed musical note onset times, we simultaneously estimate the corresponding notated rhythm and tempo process. A graphical model is developed that represents the evolution of tempo and rhythm and relates these hidden quantities to an observable performance. The rhythm variables are discrete and the tempo and observat...

comparable to or slightly slower than allegro. John Holden notes in his musical essay of 1770 (Part I, Chapter 5) that vivace is “near the same, but not quite so brisk a movement as Allegro,” and Daniel Gottlob Türk observes in his clavier treatise of 1789 (Chapter 1, Part 5) that “compositions which are marked Vivace are usually played too fast.” Primary sources also reveal performance practic...