Investigating pianists' individuality in the performance of five timbral nuances through patterns of articulation, touch, dynamics, and pedaling

Timbre is an essential expressive feature in piano performance. Concert pianists use a vast palette of timbral nuances to color their performances at the microstructural level. Although timbre is generally envisioned in the pianistic community as an abstract concept carried through an imaged vocabulary, performers may share some common strategies of timbral expression in piano performance. Yet there may remain further leeway for idiosyncratic processes in the production of piano timbre nuances. In this study, we examined the patterns of timbral expression in performances by four expert pianists. Each pianist performed four short pieces, each with five different timbral intentions (bright, dark, dry, round, and velvety). The performances were recorded with the high-accuracy Bösendorfer CEUS system. Fine-grained performance features of dynamics, touch, articulation and pedaling were extracted. Reduced PCA performance spaces and descriptive performance portraits confirmed that pianists exhibited unique, specific profiles for different timbral intentions, derived from underlying traits of general individuality, while sharing some broad commonalities of dynamics and articulation for each timbral intention. These results confirm that pianists' abstract notions of timbre correspond to reliable patterns of performance technique. Furthermore, these effects suggest that pianists can express individual styles while complying with specific timbral intentions.