Computational Investigations into Between-hand Synchronization in Piano Playing: Magaloff’s Complete Chopin

The paper reports on first steps towards automated computational analysis of a unique and unprecedented corpus of symbolic performance data. In particular, we focus on between-hand asynchronies – an expressive device that plays an important role particularly in Romantic music, but has not been analyzed quantitatively in any substantial way. The historic data were derived from performances by the renowned pianist Nikita Magaloff, who played the complete work of Chopin live on stage, on a computer-controlled grand piano. The mere size of this corpus (over 320,000 performed notes or almost 10 hours of continuous performance) challenges existing analysis approaches. The computational steps include score extraction, score-performance matching, definition and measurement of the analyzed features, and a computational visualization tool. We then present preliminary data to demonstrate the potential of our approach for future computational modeling and its application in computational musicology.