Perceiving individuality in harpsichord performance

Abstract

Can listeners recognize the individual characteristics of unfamiliar performers playing two different musical pieces on the harpsichord? Six professional harpsichordists, three prize-winners and three non prize-winners, made two recordings of two pieces from the Baroque period (a variation on a Partita by Frescobaldi and a rondo by François Couperin) on an instrument equipped with a MIDI console. Short (8 to 15 s) excerpts from these 24 recordings were subsequently used in a sorting task in which 20 musicians and 20 non-musicians, balanced for gender, listened to these excerpts and grouped together those that they thought had been played by the same performer. Twenty-six participants, including 17 musicians and nine non-musicians, performed significantly better than chance, demonstrating that the excerpts contained sufficient information to enable listeners to recognize the individual characteristics of the performers. The grouping accuracy of musicians was significantly higher than that observed for non-musicians. No significant difference in grouping accuracy was found between prize-winning performers and non-winners or between genders. However, the grouping accuracy was significantly higher for the rondo than for the variation, suggesting that the features of the two pieces differed in a way that affected the listeners’ ability to sort them accurately. Furthermore, only musicians performed above chance level when matching variation excerpts with rondo excerpts, suggesting that accurately assigning recordings of different pieces to their performer may require musical training. Comparisons between the MIDI performance data and the results of the sorting task revealed that tempo and, to a lesser extent, note onset asynchrony were the most important predictors of the perceived distance between performers, and that listeners appeared to rely mostly on a holistic percept of the excerpts rather than on a comparison of note-by-note expressive patterns.

Using historical accounts of harpsichord touch to empirically investigate the production and perception of dynamics on the 1788 Taskin

“…For the harpsichord, however, despite the many descriptions of how to sit at the keyboard and general considerations on how important it is to have a beautiful touch, there is a paucity of historical sources that specifically describe finger movements in relation to sound production, and harpsichord touch has received less modern empirical attention. Recent harpsichord performance studies tend to focus on such aspects as timing, with chosen tempo and, to a lesser extent, note onset asynchrony being indicators of the perceived individual difference between performers ( Koren and Gingras, 2014 ), with individual differences found in the production of key velocity values across performers and between different pieces of repertoire ( Gingras et al, 2013 ). When investigating voice emphasis in MIDI recordings of twelve harpsichordists, Gingras et al (2009) noted that both detached articulation and increased key velocity were used to emphasize upper voices (although the extent of this key velocity variation between emphasized and un-emphasized voices was deemed modest).…”

Individuality in music performance: introduction to the research topic

“…Gingras et al ( 2013 ) invited harpsichordists to record three different pieces and identified global markers of individuality, such as performers consistently using a more detached articulation across all three pieces, as well as associations between the note-by-note expressive profiles of different performers that subsisted across pieces or expressive parameters. In a follow-up to an earlier study on organ performance (Gingras et al, 2011 ), Koren and Gingras ( 2014 ) investigated whether listeners could reliably identify harpsichordists playing short excerpts from two different pieces. They found that musicians were more accurate than non-musicians, and only musicians performed above chance when matching the two different pieces to the same performer.…”

Individuality in Piano Performance Depends on Skill Learning

“…In other words, music carries identity information. Individuality in music performance has recently attracted the attention of researchers in psychology and musicology [1,6,8]. However, whether musical individuality is linked to mechanisms of skill acquisition remains largely unexplored.…”