last modified: 10 01, 2009
Rencon Workshop at ISMIR 2006
The results of the Rencon 2006 Performance Rendering Contest were presented at the panel session on Expression in Music at the 7th International Conference on Music Information Retrieval in Victoria, Canada, and are repeated here.
Compulsory section
Set piece: Chopin's piano Etude in E major (Op.10, No.3, bars 1-21).
7 entries were received from 4 systems, as shown in the following table:
| SYSTEM | AUTHORS | ENTRIES |
| Pop-E | Mitsuyo Hashida, Noriko Nagata, Haruhiro Katayose | One entry |
| COPER | Kenzi Noike, Yosuke Ito, Haruhiro Katayose | Closed, open |
| Kagurame Phase-II | Atsushi Shimuzu, Anna Harada, Taizan Suzuki, Kenzi Noike, Yukio Tokunaga | One entry |
| Ha-Hi-Hun | Yosuke Ito, Kenzi Noike, Haruhiro Katayose, Keiji Hirata | Closed, open, dead-pan |
Open section
Any piece and instrument was allowed.
4 entries were received from 2 systems, as listed below:
| SYSTEM | AUTHOR | PIECE |
| Pop-E | Mitsuyo Hashida, Noriko Nagata, Haruhiro Katayose | Tchaikovsky: Adagio from Swan Lake, Act 2 |
| Pop-E | Mitsuyo Hashida, Noriko Nagata, Haruhiro Katayose | Rachmaninov: Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini |
| Superconductor | Manfred Clynes | Beethoven: Eroica Symphony, Op.55, Mvt.4 |
| Superconductor | Manfred Clynes | Brahms: Violin Concerto, Op.77, Mvt.1 |
Evaluation
Entries were evaluated on 3 scales:- Overall quality of performance
- Extent to which the performance sounds human
- How interesting is the performance
Compulsary Section Results
Apart from the 7 entries, two additional non-entries were evaluated as controls: the deadpan (metronomical) version of the excerpt, and an average version created from recordings of 22 human pianists by averaging the timing intervals and dynamics of the notes.
| AUTHOR | SYSTEM | QUALITY | HUMAN | INTEREST |
| --- | (Average) | 1.8 | 1.5 | 2.2 |
| Hashida et al. | Pop-E | 3.1 | 2.5 | 3.0 |
| Shimuzu et al. | Kagurame Phase-II | 3.6 | 2.9 | 3.6 |
| --- | (Deadpan) | 3.9 | 3.8 | 4.5 |
| Ito et al. | Ha-Hi-Hun (closed) | 4.1 | 3.1 | 4.2 |
| Noike et al. | Coper (open) | 4.1 | 3.2 | 2.9 |
| Noike et al. | Coper (closed) | 4.1 | 3.5 | 3.5 |
| Ito et al. | Ha-Hi-Hun (deadpan) | 4.5 | 4.0 | 4.5 |
| Ito et al. | Ha-Hi-Hun (open) | 4.6 | 4.2 | 4.2 |
Open Section Results
| AUTHOR | SYSTEM | PIECE | QUALITY | HUMAN | INTEREST |
| Clynes | Superconductor | Beethoven: Eroica Symphony, Op.55, Mvt.4 | 2.1 | 2.4 | 2.2 |
| Hashida et al. | Pop-E | Tchaikovsky: Adagio from Swan Lake, Act 2 | 2.2 | 2.2 | 2.6 |
| Hashida et al. | Pop-E | Rachmaninov: Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini | 3.0 | 2.8 | 2.9 |
| Clynes | Superconductor | Brahms: Violin Concerto, Op.77, Mvt.1 | 3.5 | 3.5 | 3.5 |
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Doug Eck (University of Montreal) for use of the Bösendorfer CEUS piano at the BRAMS lab and Werner Goebl (McGill University) for help with recordings for the compulsory section of the competition.