Automatic assessment of violin performance using dynamic time warping classification

Abstract

The automatic assessment of music performance has become an area of special interest due to the increasing amount of technology-enhanced music learning systems. However, in most of these systems the assessment of the musical performance is based on the accuracy of onsets and pitch, paying little attention to other relevant aspects of performance. In this paper we present a preliminary study to assess the quality of violin performance using machine learning techniques. We collect recording examples of selected violin exercises varying from expert to amateur performances. We process the audio signal to extract features to train models using clustering based on Dynamic Time Warping distance. The quality of new performances is evaluated based on the level of match/miss-match to each of the recorded training examples.