Annotation and Analysis of Recorded Piano Performances on the Web

Advancing knowledge and understanding about performed music is hampered by a lack of annotation data for music expressivity. To enable large-scale collection of annotations and explorations of performed music, the authors have created a workflow that is enabled by CosmoNote, a Web-based citizen science tool for annotating musical structures created by the performer and experienced by the listener during expressive piano performances. To enable annotation tasks with CosmoNote, annotators can listen to the recorded performances and view synchronized music visualization layers including the audio waveform, recorded notes, extracted audio features such as loudness and tempo, and score features such as harmonic tension. Annotators have the ability to zoom into specific parts of a performance and see visuals and listen to the audio from just that part. The annotation of performed musical structures is done by using boundaries of varying strengths, regions, comments, and note groups. By analyzing the annotations collected with CosmoNote, performance decisions will be able to be modeled and analyzed in order to aid in the understanding of expressive choices in musical performances and discover the vocabulary of performed musical structures.