Exploring the spontaneous expression of human finger-tapping

Abstract

We present a study on the behavior of human finger-tapping and the spontaneous expression of rhythm. For the purposes of this study we construe interpret finger-tapping as the casual and rhythmic hitting of objects for the expression of music. Our motivation for this study is to connect spontaneous finger-tapping, human-computer interaction and the automatic arrangement of percussion for music creation. Specifically, here we report on the characterization of spontaneous rhythm creation behavior as a prerequisite to develop rhythm-aware music creation interfaces. First, we collect a dataset by recording spontaneous finger-tapping patterns performed by subjects from different music backgrounds. An online survey gathering information about the recording is then submitted to the volunteers. Analysis of the survey answers and low-level audio features suggest that there are two ways for finger-tapping depending on the music skills of the performer (i.e., "experts" versus "naive tappers"). We explore the former hypothesis by conducting a classification task between onsets from both finger-tapping methods. We achieve a 96% of accuracy in recognizing drumming expertise levels (expert vs. naive) by means of using onset-related acoustic features. Results suggest that people with percussion training are more concerned about timbre aspects and, thus, can take advantage of this quality of sound to provide nuances to each stroke when finger-tapping, as opposed to non-expertise individuals.