Measurement, Recognition, and Visualization of Piano Pedaling Gestures and Techniques

This paper presents a study of piano pedaling gestures and techniques on the sustain pedal from the perspective of measurement, recognition, and visualization. Pedaling gestures can be captured by a dedicated measurement system where the sensor data can be simultaneously recorded alongside the piano sound under normal playing conditions. Using the sensor data collected from the system, the recognition is comprised of two separate tasks: pedal onset/offset detection and classification by technique. The onset and offset times of each pedaling technique were computed using signal processing algorithms. Based on features extracted from every segment when the pedal is pressed, the task of classifying the segments by pedaling technique was undertaken using machine learning methods. We compared Support Vector Machines (SVM) and hidden Markov models (HMM) for this task. Our system achieves high accuracies, over 0.7 F1 score for all techniques and over 0.9 on average. The recognition results can be represented using novel pedaling notations and visualized in an audio-based score following application.