Can Audio Reveal Music Performance Difficulty? Insights from the Piano Syllabus Dataset

Automatically estimating the performance difficulty of a music piece represents a key process in music education to create tailored curricula according to the individual needs of the students. Given its relevance, the Music Information Retrieval (MIR) field depicts some proof-of-concept works addressing this task that mainly focuses on high-level music abstractions such as machine-readable scores or music sheet images. In this regard, the potential of directly analyzing audio recordings has been generally neglected, which prevents students from exploring diverse music pieces that may not have a formal symbolic-level transcription. This work pioneers in the automatic estimation of performance difficulty of music pieces on audio recordings with two precise contributions: (i) the first audio-based difficulty estimation dataset -- namely, Piano Syllabus (PSyllabus) dataset -- featuring 7,901 piano pieces across 11 difficulty levels from 1,233 composers; and (ii) a recognition framework capable of managing different input representations -- both unimodal and multimodal manners -- directly derived from audio to perform the difficulty estimation task. The comprehensive experimentation comprising different pre-training schemes, input modalities, and multi-task scenarios prove the validity of the proposal and establishes PSyllabus as a reference dataset for audio-based difficulty estimation in the MIR field. The dataset as well as the developed code and trained models are publicly shared to promote further research in the field.

Predicting performance difficulty from piano sheet music images

Estimating the performance difficulty of a musical score is crucial in music education for adequately designing the learning curriculum of the students. Although the Music Information Retrieval community has recently shown interest in this task, existing approaches mainly use machine-readable scores, leaving the broader case of sheet music images unaddressed. Based on previous works involving sheet music images, we use a mid-level representation, bootleg score, describing notehead positions relative to staff lines coupled with a transformer model. This architecture is adapted to our task by introducing an encoding scheme that reduces the encoded sequence length to one-eighth of the original size. In terms of evaluation, we consider five datasets -- more than 7500 scores with up to 9 difficulty levels -- , two of them particularly compiled for this work. The results obtained when pretraining the scheme on the IMSLP corpus and fine-tuning it on the considered datasets prove the proposal's validity, achieving the best-performing model with a balanced accuracy of 40.34\% and a mean square error of 1.33. Finally, we provide access to our code, data, and models for transparency and reproducibility.

Combining piano performance dimensions for score difficulty classification

Predicting the difficulty of playing a musical score is essential for structuring and exploring score collections. Despite its importance for music education, the automatic difficulty classification of piano scores is not yet solved, mainly due to the lack of annotated data and the subjectiveness of the annotations. This paper aims to advance the state-of-the-art in score difficulty classification with two major contributions. To address the lack of data, we present Can I Play It? (CIPI) dataset, a machine-readable piano score dataset with difficulty annotations obtained from the renowned classical music publisher Henle Verlag. The dataset is created by matching public domain scores with difficulty labels from Henle Verlag, then reviewed and corrected by an expert pianist. As a second contribution, we explore various input representations from score information to pre-trained ML models for piano fingering and expressiveness inspired by the musicology definition of performance. We show that combining the outputs of multiple classifiers performs better than the classifiers on their own, pointing to the fact that the representations capture different aspects of difficulty. In addition, we conduct numerous experiments that lay a foundation for score difficulty classification and create a basis for future research. Our best-performing model reports a 39.47% balanced accuracy and 1.13 median square error across the nine difficulty levels proposed in this study. Code, dataset, and models are made available for reproducibility.

Score difficulty analysis for piano performance education based on fingering

In this paper, we introduce score difficulty classification as a sub-task of music information retrieval (MIR), which may be used in music education technologies, for personalised curriculum generation, and score retrieval. We introduce a novel dataset for our task, Mikrokosmos-difficulty, containing 147 piano pieces in symbolic representation and the corresponding difficulty labels derived by its composer B\'ela Bart\'ok and the publishers. As part of our methodology, we propose piano technique feature representations based on different piano fingering algorithms. We use these features as input for two classifiers: a Gated Recurrent Unit neural network (GRU) with attention mechanism and gradient-boosted trees trained on score segments. We show that for our dataset fingering based features perform better than a simple baseline considering solely the notes in the score. Furthermore, the GRU with attention mechanism classifier surpasses the gradient-boosted trees. Our proposed models are interpretable and are capable of generating difficulty feedback both locally, on short term segments, and globally, for whole pieces. Code, datasets, models, and an online demo are made available for reproducibility