Music Performance Analysis: A Survey

TL;DR

This survey reviews Music Performance Analysis (MPA), emphasizing its importance in understanding how different performances influence music perception and highlighting research opportunities beyond traditional MIR focus on audio signals.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of MPA, discussing its significance, current state, and future research directions in relation to MIR.

Findings

MPA offers insights into performance variations affecting perception

Current MIR often overlooks performance nuances

Future research can integrate MPA for richer music analysis

Abstract

Music Information Retrieval (MIR) tends to focus on the analysis of audio signals. Often, a single music recording is used as representative of a "song" even though different performances of the same song may reveal different properties. A performance is distinct in many ways from a (arguably more abstract) representation of a "song," "piece," or musical score. The characteristics of the (recorded) performance -- as opposed to the score or musical idea -- can have a major impact on how a listener perceives music. The analysis of music performance, however, has been traditionally only a peripheral topic for the MIR research community. This paper surveys the field of Music Performance Analysis (MPA) from various perspectives, discusses its significance to the field of MIR, and points out opportunities for future research in this field.