Liszt’s Étude S.136 no.1: audio data analysis of two different piano recordings

In this paper, we review the main signal processing tools of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) from audio data, and we apply them to two recordings (by Leslie Howard and Thomas Rajna) of Franz Liszt’s Étude S.136 no.1, with the aim of uncovering the macro-formal structure and comparing the interpretative styles of the two performers. In particular, after a thorough spectrogram analysis, we perform a segmentation based on the degree of novelty, in the sense of spectral dissimilarity, calculated frame-by-frame via the cosine distance. We then compare the metrical, temporal and timbrical features of the two executions by MIR tools. Via this method, we are able to identify in a data-driven way the different moments of the piece according to their melodic and harmonic content, and to find out that Rajna’s execution is faster and less various, in terms of intensity and timbre, than Howard’s one. This enquiry represents a case study able to show the potentialities of MIR from audio data in supporting traditional music score analyses and in providing objective information for statistically founded musical execution analyses.