Organizations: Mobile Multimedia Laboratory, Department of Informatics, School of Information Sciences and Technology, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece
Studio recording techniques vary considerably, ranging from live recordings in a shared acoustic space, to isolated booth recording and overdubbing, where musicians record their parts separately, while listening to previously recorded material. These approaches differ in terms of physical co-presence, visual contact, sound leakage, and acoustic isolation, factors that may influence musical coordination. This study investigates whether the recording style affects timing precision; specifically, whether musicians performing together in the same space achieve tighter temporal coordination. To address these questions, two datasets with a total of 391 multi-track recordings were analyzed to measure the timing relationships between musicians. In addition, an automated sound-leakage detection method was employed to infer the recording conditions of each song: pairwise Mel-spectrogram similarities between the tracks were computed, and summary statistics from the resulting similarity matrices were used to identify recordings with shared acoustic content. The results suggest that recordings showing evidence of shared room acoustics and sound leakage tend to exhibit lower timing variability than highly isolated recordings, whereas overdubbing is associated with increased timing variability.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: Mean std( Δt ) against mean absolute Δt distribution among both datasets
Fig. 2: RMS envelope correlation matrix. Song with leakage
Fig. 3: RMS envelope correlation matrix. Song without leakage
Fig. 4: Mel-Spectrogram correlation matrix. Song with leakage
Fig. 5: Mel-Spectrogram correlation matrix. Song without leakage
Fig. 6: Timing stability against median Mel-Spectrogram correlation score for both datasets, indicating for each data point whether leakage existed.
Fig. 7: Timing stability boxplot for each leakage condition.
In this study, we explore how pianists can customize Music Minus One (MMO) concerto accompaniments to match their playing style. Bypassing the need for a symbolic score, often not available digitally, we use three types of audio data: solo piano recordings, MMO orchestra-only recordings, and mixed recordings of both piano and orchestra (e.g., from YouTube). The mixed recording serves as an intermediary reference to align the solo and orchestra parts, with only the orchestral part being adjusted through time-scale modification to synchronize with the user's playing. The main challenge with estimating these alignments is the spectral mismatch between recordings containing different musical parts. Motivated by this application scenario, we introduce Dense-Sparse DTW, a variant of Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) that is designed to improve robustness of alignments to spectral mismatch by focusing on aligning a selected subset of audio frames containing prominent timing cues. We collect and annotate data from four piano concerto movements and establish a framework for generating and evaluating customized accompaniment recordings. On this benchmark, we show that Dense-Sparse DTW has better or comparable performance than more complex approaches based on source separation and spectral subtraction techniques.
TJ Tsai, Kavi Dey, Yigitcan Ozer +1
Harvey Mudd College · Claremont, CA USA · International Audio Laboratories +1
Empirical performance analysis depends on the accurate extraction of tempo data from recordings, yet standard computational tools, designed for monophonic audio or modern studio conditions, fail systematically when applied to historical polyphonic chamber music. This paper documents the failure of automated beat-detection software on duo recordings of Beethoven's five piano and cello sonatas (Op.~5 Nos.1 and2; Op.~69; Op.~102 Nos.1 and2), and presents a formalised manual alternative: a cumulative lap-timer protocol that yields bar-level beats-per-minute data with millisecond resolution. The protocol, developed in cross-disciplinary collaboration with an engineer specialising in VLSI design, rests on a cumulative timestamp architecture that prevents error accumulation, permits internal self-validation, and captures expressive timing phenomena (rubato, fermatas, accelerandi, ritardandi) that automated tools systematically suppress or misread. The mathematical derivation of the BPM formula, the spreadsheet data structure, and the error characterisation are presented in full. Applied to over one hundred movement-level recordings spanning 1930--2012, the protocol generated a dataset subsequently visualised through tempographs, histograms with spline-smoothed probability density functions, ridgeline plots, and combination charts. The paper argues that manual annotation is not a methodological retreat but a principled response to the intrinsic limitations of computational tools when faced with the specific challenges of polyphonic historical recordings. The complete dataset and analysis code are publicly available.
Computational musicology enables systematic analysis of performative and structural traits in recorded music, yet existing approaches remain largely tailored to notated, score-based repertoires. This study advances a methodology for analyzing voice-guitar interaction in Carlos Paredes's vocal collaborations - an oral-tradition context where compositional and performative layers co-emerge. Using source-separated stems, physics-informed harmonic modelling, and beat-level audio descriptors, we examine melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic relationships across eight recordings with four singers. Our commonality-diversity framework, combining multi-scale correlation analysis with residual-based detection of structural deviations, reveals that expressive coordination is predominantly piece-specific rather than corpus-wide. Diversity events systematically align with formal boundaries and textural shifts, demonstrating that the proposed approach can identify musically salient reorganizations with minimal human annotation. The framework further offers a generalizable computational strategy for repertoires without notated blueprints, extending Music Performance Analysis into oral-tradition and improvisation-inflected practices.
Gilberto Bernardes, Nádia Moura, António Sá Pinto
INESC TEC, Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto · CEIS20, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Coimbra