Music Performance Analysis: A Survey
Alexander Lerch, Claire Arthur, Ashis Pati, Siddharth, Gururani

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.
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsMusic and Audio Processing · Neuroscience and Music Perception · Music Technology and Sound Studies
