Components of musical expression

This research aims at a method to split the expressive signal into its structural elements based on a generalization of existing generative models. It will shed more light on the anatomy of expressive timing and dynamics, yielding ways to estimate optimal parameter settings for the models and to estimate the amounts of variation that can be attributed to the different musical structural descriptions.

• Timmers, R., Ashley, R, Desain, P, and Heijink, H. (2000) The influence of musical context on tempo rubato. Journal of New Music Research 131-158.
• Timmers, R. and Ashley, R. (1999) Influences of musical context and pianist stategy on the timing of a melody. In Proceedings of the 1999 SMPC, 82. Evanston.
• Penel, A., Desain, P., Maris, E., and Windsor, W. L. (1999) A decomposition model of expressive timing. In Proceedings of the 1999 SMPC, 21. Evanston.
• Desain, P. and Honing, H. (1997) How to evaluate generative models of expression in music performance. In Isssues in AI and Music Evaluation and Assessment. International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence., 5-7. Nagoya: Japan.
• Desain, P. and Honing, H. (1997) Structural Expression Component Theory (SECT), and a method for decomposing expression in music performance. In Proceedings of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition Conference., 38. Cambridge: MIT.