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Real Time Tracking and Visualisation of Musical Expression

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Music and Artificial Intelligence (ICMAI 2002)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 2445))

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Abstract

Skilled musicians are able to shape a given piece of music (by continuously modulating aspects like tempo, loudness, etc.) to communicate high level information such as musical structure and emotion. This activity is commonly referred to as expressive music performance. The present paper presents another step towards the automatic high-level analysis of this elusive phenomenon with AI methods. A system is presented that is able to measure tempo and dynamics of a musical performance and to track their development over time. The system accepts raw audio input, tracks tempo and dynamics changes in real time, and displays the development of these expressive parameters in an intuitive and aesthetically appealing graphical format which provides insight into the expressive patterns applied by skilled artists. The paper describes the tempo tracking algorithm (based on a new clustering method) in detail, and then presents an application of the system to the analysis of performances by different pianists.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Schottengasse 3, A-1010, Vienna, Austria

    Simon Dixon, Werner Goebl & Gerhard Widmer

Authors
  1. Simon Dixon
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  2. Werner Goebl
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  3. Gerhard Widmer
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Music, University of Edinburgh, 12 Nicolson Square, EH8 9DF, Edinburgh, UK

    Christina Anagnostopoulou  & Miguel Ferrand  & 

  2. Division of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, 80 South Bridge, EH1 1HN, Edinburgh, UK

    Alan Smaill

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© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Dixon, S., Goebl, W., Widmer, G. (2002). Real Time Tracking and Visualisation of Musical Expression. In: Anagnostopoulou, C., Ferrand, M., Smaill, A. (eds) Music and Artificial Intelligence. ICMAI 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2445. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45722-4_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45722-4_7

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-44145-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45722-0

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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