Expert and Novice Evaluations of Piano Performances: Criteria for Computer-Aided Feedback

Learning an instrument can be rewarding, but is unavoidably a huge undertaking. Receiving constructive feedback on one's playing is crucial for improvement. However, personal feedback from an expert instructor is seldom available on demand. The goal motivating this project is to build software that will provide comparably useful feedback to beginners, in order to supplement feedback from human instructors. To lay the groundwork for that, in this paper we investigate performance assessment criteria from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives. We gathered 83 piano performances from 21 players. Each recording was evaluated by both expert piano instructors and novice players. This dataset is unique in that the novice evaluators are also players, and that both quantitative and qualitative evaluations are collected. Our analysis of the evaluations indicates that the kind of specific, concrete piano techniques that are most elusive to novice evaluators are precisely the kind of characteristics that can be detected, measured, and visualized for learners by a well-designed software tool.