The Batik-plays-Mozart Corpus: Linking Performance to Score to Musicological Annotations

We present the Batik-plays-Mozart Corpus, a piano performance dataset combining professional Mozart piano sonata performances with expert-labelled scores at a note-precise level. The performances originate from a recording by Viennese pianist Roland Batik on a computer-monitored B\"osendorfer grand piano, and are available both as MIDI files and audio recordings. They have been precisely aligned, note by note, with a current standard edition of the corresponding scores (the New Mozart Edition) in such a way that they can further be connected to the musicological annotations (harmony, cadences, phrases) on these scores that were recently published by Hentschel et al. (2021). The result is a high-quality, high-precision corpus mapping scores and musical structure annotations to precise note-level professional performance information. As the first of its kind, it can serve as a valuable resource for studying various facets of expressive performance and their relationship with structural aspects. In the paper, we outline the curation process of the alignment and conduct two exploratory experiments to demonstrate its usefulness in analyzing expressive performance.

The ACCompanion: Combining Reactivity, Robustness, and Musical Expressivity in an Automatic Piano Accompanist

This paper introduces the ACCompanion, an expressive accompaniment system. Similarly to a musician who accompanies a soloist playing a given musical piece, our system can produce a human-like rendition of the accompaniment part that follows the soloist's choices in terms of tempo, dynamics, and articulation. The ACCompanion works in the symbolic domain, i.e., it needs a musical instrument capable of producing and playing MIDI data, with explicitly encoded onset, offset, and pitch for each played note. We describe the components that go into such a system, from real-time score following and prediction to expressive performance generation and online adaptation to the expressive choices of the human player. Based on our experience with repeated live demonstrations in front of various audiences, we offer an analysis of the challenges of combining these components into a system that is highly reactive and precise, while still a reliable musical partner, robust to possible performance errors and responsive to expressive variations.