What Really Moves Us in Music: Expressivity as a Challenge to Semantic Audio Research

Semantic Audio and Music Information Retrieval (MIR) Research have led to some spectacular successes in recent years. In this presentation I will introduce performance expression as an important dimension of the 'semantics' of a piece of music; discuss and demonstrate what it means to extract, quantify, characterise, and model this via machine; review recent work on computational modelling of performance expression; sketch possible application scenarios; and identify pertinent research challenges for our field. Generally, my aim is to promote a field of research that not all attendees of this conference may be so familiar with and that, I believe, is of real importance when we speak of the 'semantics' of musical audio.