New Frontiers in Psychology paper on A Novel Graphical Interface for the Analysis of Music Practice Behaviors

The paper I wrote together with Janis Sokolovskis and Elaine Chew from QMUL, called A Novel Interface for the Graphical Analysis of Music Practice Behaviours was just poublished in Frontiers in Psychology - Human-Media Interaction. Read the full article here or download the pdf.

Abstract
Practice is an essential part of music training, but critical content-based analyses of practice behaviors still lack tools for conveying informative representation of practice sessions. To bridge this gap, we present a novel visualization system, the Music Practice Browser, for representing, identifying, and analysing music practice behaviors. The Music Practice Browser provides a graphical interface for reviewing recorded practice sessions, which allows musicians, teachers, and researchers to examine aspects and features of music practice behaviors. The system takes beat and practice segment information together with a musical score in XML format as input, and produces a number of different visualizations: Practice Session Work Maps give an overview of contiguous practice segments; Practice Segment Arcs make evident transitions and repeated segments; Practice Session Precision Maps facilitate the identifying of errors; Tempo-Loudness Evolution Graphs track expressive variations over the course of a practice session. We then test the new system on practice sessions of pianists of varying levels of expertise ranging from novice to expert. The practice patterns found include Drill-Correct, Drill-Smooth, Memorization Strategy, Review and Explore, and Expressive Evolution. The analysis reveals practice patterns and behavior differences between beginners and experts, such as a higher proportion of Drill-Smooth patterns in expert practice.

Reference:
Sokolovskis J., Herremans D., Chew E.. 2018. A Novel Interface for the Graphical Analysis of Music Practice Behaviours. Frontiers in Psychology - Human-Media Interaction. 9. pp 2292.