OPINION SCIENCE & MUSIC NATURE|Vol 453|26 June 2008

ESSAY
Beyond the notes
The way performers shape notes brings music to life.
Nicholas Cook argues that measuring these subtle changes
can help us appreciate and replicate the performer’s art.

he art of musical performance lies largely and dynamic accents to under-

T in nuance — in making notes longer

or shorter than they are written, or in
shaping their dynamics, articulation or pitch.
line structural breaks or bring out
important points.
Line graphs of tempo and dynamics
Performers don’t generally have explicit theo- are hard to relate to the music we hear,
ries of these things, as it’s all done by ear. But but over the past two years software has
these often subtle changes to the written score been developed that incorporates these
are responsible for a great deal of what makes graphs within a music visualization
music memorable, moving and meaningful program so that they scroll past a cursor
— and they can be measured. as one listens. Other limitations to this type
This combination of cultural meaning and of approach are less tractable. If performance
measurability makes musical performance is analysed in terms of the score-based struc-
a productive example of the relationship ture, one is deaf to aspects of the performance
between science and the humanities. When that have nothing to do with what is written
musicology came into being in the nineteenth down. In effect, this assumes that the point of
century, it was modelled on philology, the performance is to reproduce a meaning that
study of ancient texts. For this reason, musi- is already there on the printed page, but any
cologists have tended to think of music as a jazz or pop performance demonstrates what Research Centre for the History and Analysis
form of writing. But much of what performers an inadequate approach that is. of Recorded Music (CHARM) in London
do, and what listeners respond to, falls between There is a further, more subtle, problem. recently analysed phrase arching in record-
the notes as musicologists construe them. This Try dancing to a Chopin mazurka and it soon ings of Chopin’s Mazurka Op. 63 No. 3 going
is where science comes in. becomes clear that concert evocations of dance back to 1923. We measured how much shap-
Measurements cannot capture cultural val- music have much more extravagant shaping ing of phrases occurred through tempo and
ues, but people listening to music respond to than music that is for actual dancing. A tempo dynamics, and how far these variables were
specific sounds. These sounds are amenable to graph would show this, and so says something correlated. We found that, for this piece at
scientific study, providing insights into the cul- about the music one experiences. Its shape, how- least, both tempo and dynamic phrasing were
tural values they embody. I focus on classical ever, is the result of several distinct factors. To present in the earliest recordings, but that
piano performance, but my claim is more gen- understand what is going on, we need to break they began to be closely coordinated with
eral: to understand music as performance, we the data down into their component parts. The one another and with the composed phrasing
must use scientific and humanities approaches question is what those parts might be. only after the Second World War. Different
in tandem. performers achieved this coordination in vari-
Musical movement ous ways, but the effect was a streamlined style
Stick to the plot In the early 1990s, Henkjan Honing and Peter that was still expressive, albeit less personal
Two of the most important aspects of musical Desain suggested that the shaping of both and subjective than pre-war interpretations.
performance are the shaping of the tempo and tempo and dynamics in classical music perfor- This finding shows how the nature of what
the dynamics. Tempo shaping is the lengthen- mance can be explained in terms of three main is regarded as musicality has changed. What
ing or shortening of notes or phrases and is components: note-to-note shaping, the com- was assumed to be a general, perhaps hard-
measured by extracting beat durations from poser’s ‘pulse’, and hierarchical phrase arching. wired, quality turns out to be specific to a
sound. Dynamics shaping is the patterning of The third of these refers to the way performers given time and place. Indeed, the very idea of
loud and soft notes, to create one-off accents get faster and louder as they play into a phrase, ‘expressive’ performance, defined in terms of
or waves of increase and decrease. It can be and softer and quieter as they come out of it, nuance, assumes that the purpose of music is
extracted as a continuously varying value or giving the music a kind of breathing quality. to convey subjective feeling — an idea foreign
as a series of discrete values associated with It is often seen in nineteenth-century piano to Japanese taiko drumming, for example. That
individual notes. music, such as Chopin’s. It is hierarchical in that is why these studies concentrate almost exclu-
Musicologists and psychologists have such patterns can be found at multiple levels sively on Western classical music.
generally focused on how such data relate — such as 2, 4, 8 and even 16 bars. It is widely
to the structure of music, drawing on tradi- seen as part of what it means to play ‘musically’, Mechanical musicians
tional, notation-based analytical methods. For that is to say expressively and meaningfully. It should be possible to apply a fully
instance, reading by means of a kind of reverse Musicologists tend to be suspicious of such functioning model of expressive perfor-
engineering from the performance back to the generalizations. What is considered ‘musical’ mance to a digital score that computers
composition, they have shown how perform- has varied throughout history, as have prac- and synthesizers can read, in which every
ers use various combinations of speed change tices of performance. My team at the AHRC crotchet (US quarter note) is the same length.
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NATURE|Vol 453|26 June 2008 SCIENCE & MUSIC OPINION

idiosyncratic balletic correlate to the sound.

D. PARKINS
His performance makes perfect sense on CD,
but seeing it adds further meaning. The strik-
ing quality of public display in his playing is
redolent of the cavernous spaces of
modern concert halls and the star
quality of the international virtuoso.
He enacts exceptionality.
Such evocative flourishes
communicate cultural val-
ues that cannot be mea-
sured. Sokolov, like many
Russian pianists, uses partic-
ularly strong phrase arching.
His expressiveness is structurally
generated, rather than primarily
located at the note-to-note level
as with pre-war pianists, so he
is free to indulge in extrava-
gant choreography without
losing the musical thread.
Quantitative analysis
reveals how phrase arching facili-
tates Sokolov’s virtuosity. Without a systematic
approach we would have much less idea about
how these effects are created. It would be hard
This would result in an expressive and mean- effectively generating new recordings of pieces to quantify how Sokolov’s style relates to that
ingful sound output that is mechanically gen- they never played. You might even fantasize of other pianists.
erated but sounds human, reducing creativity about music being mixed in the same way as Programs such as Director Musices or the
to a set of rules. paint. Instead of buying recordings off the peg, CHARM model of phrase arching can be used
Some programs do this on the basis of like standard paint ranges, you could custom- to capture the general qualities of performance.
note-to-note shaping and composer’s ‘pulse’. ize them: 50% Vladimir Horowitz, 45% Arturo The mark of their success is the extent to which
Director Musices is a free, research-oriented Michelangeli and 5% Jean-Marc Luisada, say. they account for the variance in performance
program that uses a set of rules, for example But a musical performance isn’t a pot of data. Such applications can also be used to
that longer notes are louder than shorter ones, paint. It is a human action carried out at a cer- study a particular performance, such as Soko-
or that a run of ascending notes gets faster; tain time and place, normally in the presence of lov playing Op. 63 No. 3. Here the interest lies
there is also a simple phrase-arching function. others and marked by the contingencies of the in the pattern of discrepancies between the
These rules can be switched occasion. The same applies to model and the performance. The focus is on
on or off, applied more or less recordings, even when they owe the unique features, and the criterion of success
strongly, or even inverted.
“You might even more to studio manipulation is: how far the model guides the ear towards
The commercial program fantasize about music than real-time performance. an awareness of these qualities, resulting in a
SuperConductor is based on being mixed in the We still hear them as traces of process of engaged listening and critical inter-
the idea that for every major events. Remove the communi- pretation. Used thus, deterministic models of
composer there is a charac-
same way as paint.” cation from music and it rap- performance expression do not undermine
teristic signature (or pulse) for idly becomes as pointless as it values of human creativity, but locate them
each beat in the bar, and allows you to ‘sculpt’ would be to spend time in the virtual world more accurately.
a file into an expressive performance. A new Second Life if there were no real people behind Scientific measurement and cultural app-
program currently in beta testing, Silbert MOR the avatars and speech bubbles. roaches to performance can be linked use-
Expressive Performance, automatically gener- fully. But this is a marriage of complementary
ates human-like performances and is targeted A search for meaning approaches, rather than a convergence towards
at professionals such as the producers of TV Performance, then, is more than the communi- a unified discipline. ■
commercials who want music without the cation of structural information about musical Nicholas Cook is director of the AHRC Research
trouble and expense of paying musicians or works. The very act of performance generates Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded
licensing recordings. meaning, whether the musician is Madonna, Music, Royal Holloway, University of London,
Such tools are a far cry from the ‘human- Miles Davis or Glenn Gould. Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX, UK. He is the author
ize’ functions of sequencing programs, which In a 2002 concert performance of Mazurka of The Schenker Project: Culture, Race and Music
merely introduce random variation. And if, as Op. 63 No. 3 filmed at the Théâtre des Theory in Fin-de-siècle Vienna.
the CHARM research suggests, performance Champs-Elysées in Paris, Russian pianist
styles can be modelled to specific times or Grigory Sokolov performs virtuosity as much For further reading see [Link]
places, variable settings could enable one to as he performs Chopin: his hands often fly up See other essays in the Science & Music series at
reproduce the style of particular pianists, after a particularly telling note, providing an [Link]/nature/focus/scienceandmusic.

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