Mixtract: A directable musical expression system

Abstract

This paper describes a music performance design system focusing on phrasing, the design and development of an intuitive interface to assist music performance design system. The proposed interface has an editor to control the parameter curves of “dynamics” and “tempos” of hierarchical phrase structures, and supports analysis mechanisms for hierarchical phrase structures that lighten the users' work for music interpretation. We are interested in how a system can assist the users in designing music performances, but not to develop a full automatic system. Unlike the most automatic performance rendering systems to date, assisting the process of music interpretation and to convey the musical interpretive intent to the system are focused in this paper. The advantage of the proposed system was verified from shortening time required for music performance design. The proposed system is more beneficial from the viewpoint that it can be a platform to test various possibilities of phrasing expression.