Identifying Saxophonists from Their Playing Styles

Abstract

We describe a novel approach to the task of identifying performers from their playing styles. We investigate how professional Jazz saxophonists express and communicate their view of the musical and emotional content of musical pieces and how to use this information in order to automatically identify performers. We study deviations of parameters such as pitch, timing, amplitude and timbre both at an inter-note level and at an intra-note level. Our approach to performer identification consists of establishing a performer dependent mapping of inter-note features to a repertoire of inflections characterized by intra-note features. We present and discuss some results of our approach and comment on future trends in this exciting research area.