CHARACTERIZING TEMPO CHANGE IN MUSICAL PERFORMANCES

Abstract

Tempo change is an essential feature of live music, yet it is difficult to measure or describe because tempo change can exist at many different scales, from inter-beat-time jitter to long-term drift over several minutes. We introduce a piece-wise linear tempo model as a representation for tempo analysis. We focus on music where tempo is nominally steady, e.g. jazz and rock. Tapped beat data was collected for music recordings, and tempo was approximated as piece-wise linear functions. We compare the steadiness of tempo in recordings by accomplished, professional artists and in those by amateur artists, and show that professionals are steadier. This work offers new insights into the nature of tempo change based on actual measurements. In principle, improved models of tempo change can be used to improve beat tracking reliability and accuracy. In addition to technical applications, observations of music practice are interesting from a musicological perspective, and our techniques might be applied to a wide range of studies in performance practice. Finally, we present an optimal function approximation algorithm that that has broader applications to representation and analysis in many computer music applications. © 2011 ICMC. All Rights Reserved.