Modeling and control of expressiveness in music performance

Expression is an important aspect of music performance. It is the added value of a performance and is part of the reason that music is interesting to listen to and sounds alive. Understanding and modeling expressive content communication is important for many engineering applications in information technology. For example, in multimedia products, textual information is enriched by means of graphical and audio objects. In this paper we present an original approach to modify the expressive content of a performance in a gradual way, both at the symbolic and signal levels. To this purpose, we discuss a model that applies a smooth morphing among performances with different expressive content, adapting the audio expressive character to the user's desires. Morphing can be realized with a wide range of graduality (from abrupt to very smooth), allowing adaptation of the system to different situations. The sound rendering is obtained by interfacing the expressiveness model with a dedicated postprocessing environment, which allows for the transformation of the event cues. The processing is based on the organized control of basic audio effects. Among the basic effects used, an original method for the spectral processing of audio is introduced.