A Perceiver-Centered Approach for Representing and Annotating Prosodic Functions in Performed Music

Area of Science:

• Musicology
• Cognitive Science
• Computational Auditory Processing

Background:

• Musical prosody, crucial for expression, lacks systematic study tools.
• Existing research often uses bottom-up methods mapping acoustics to prosody.
• A scalable, human-centered approach is needed to study prosodic functions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and evaluate a novel citizen science method for capturing musical prosodic functions.
• To investigate the relationship between listener annotations, musical structure, and acoustic properties.
• To create a reliable dataset for theoretical and data-driven models of musical prosody.

Main Methods:

• A top-down, human-centered approach utilizing listener annotations via the CosmoNote citizen science platform.
• Annotation types include boundaries, regions, note groups, and comments for segmentation and prominence.
• Exploration of various annotation strategies (intuitive vs. analytical, real-time vs. retrospective, audio vs. visual).

Main Results:

• Demonstration of a novel citizen science paradigm for studying musical prosody.
• Collection of listener annotations on segmentation and prominence in solo piano music.
• Discussion of data collection processes, annotation strategies, and error prevention techniques.

Conclusions:

• The developed method provides a scalable and effective tool for analyzing musical prosody.
• Listener-driven annotations offer valuable insights into musical structure and expression.
• The project aims to establish an annotation convention for studying prosody in performed music.