Recent technological developments are having a significant impact on musical instruments and singing voice learning. A proof is the number of successful software applications that are being used by aspiring musicians in their regular practice. These practicing apps offer many useful functionalities to support learning, including performance assessment technologies that analyze the sound produced by the student while playing, identifying performance errors and giving useful feedback. However, despite the advancements in these sound analysis technologies, they are still not reliable and effective enough to support the strict requirements of a professional music education context. In this article we first introduce the topic and context, reviewing some of the work done in the practice of music assessment, then going over the current state of the art in performance assessment technologies, and presenting, as a proof of concept, a complete assessment system that we have developed for supporting guitar exercises. We conclude by identifying the challenges that should be addressed in order to further advance these assessment technologies and their useful integration into professional learning contexts.

Dynamics are one of the fundamental tools of expressivity in a performance. While the usage of this tool is highly subjective, a systematic methodology to derive loudness markings based on a performance can be highly beneficial. With this goal in mind, this paper is a first step towards developing a methodology to automatically transcribe dynamic markings from vocal rock and pop performances. To this end, we make use of commercial recordings of some popular songs followed by source separation and compare them to the karaoke versions of the same songs. The dynamic variations in the original commercial recordings are found to be structurally very similar to the aligned karaoke/multi-track versions of the same tracks. We compare and show the differences between tracks using statistical analysis, with an eventual goal to use the transcribed markings as guiding tools, to help students adapt with a specific interpretation of a given piece of music. We perform a qualitative analysis of the proposed methodology with the teachers in terms of informativeness and accuracy.