Beyond Rules: Towards Basso Continuo Personal Style Identification

TL;DR

This paper investigates whether individual performers' styles in basso continuo can be identified using machine learning on a new dataset, highlighting the potential for personal style recognition in historically informed performance.

Contribution

It introduces a method for classifying basso continuo players based on their performances using structured representations and SVMs, emphasizing the recognition of personal styles.

Findings

Players can be reliably identified from their performances.

Structured representations like griffs capture stylistic differences.

The approach demonstrates the feasibility of personal style classification in basso continuo.

Abstract

A central part of the contemporary Historically Informed Practice movement is basso continuo, an improvised accompaniment genre with its traditions originating in the baroque era and actively practiced by many keyboard players nowadays. Although computational musicology has studied the theoretical foundations of basso continuo expressed by harmonic and voice-leading rules and constraints, characteristics of basso continuo as an active performing art have been largely overlooked mostly due to a lack of suitable performance data that could be empirically analyzed. This has changed with the introduction of The Aligned Continuo Realization Dataset (ACoRD) and the basso continuo realization-to-score alignment. Basso continuo playing is shaped by stylistic traditions coming from historical treatises, but it also may provide space for showcasing individual performance styles of its practitioners. In this paper, we attempt to explore the question of the presence of personal styles in the basso continuo realizations of players in the ACoRD dataset. We use a historically informed structured representation of basso continuo performance pitch content called griffs and Support Vector Machines to see whether it is possible to classify players based on their performances. The results show that we can identify players from their performances. In addition to the player classification problem, we discuss the elements that make up the individual styles of the players.