Data for "Infra-Delta Oscillatory Signatures and Gesture Density in Expert Piano Performance"
Description
An elite professional pianist executed a 30-minute, uninterrupted performance of seven pieces on a Yamaha P-225B digital piano in an anechoic chamber, employing the default soundbank. The repertoire featured Contrapunctus I (BWV 1080) by Bach and an excerpt from Chopin’s Ballade No. 1, Op. 23, performed from memory based on urtext editions. Key-press onset events were annotated per hand to quantify note and gesture counts, excluding legato transitions without discrete attacks. Both performances exhibited a convergent low-frequency periodicity in beat-level timing variability (tactus imprecision), oscillating at approximately 0.36 Hz. This slow temporal modulation aligns with the delta-band range of neural oscillations and may reflect a shared endogenous timing scaffold, plausibly motor in origin, underlying expressive control in skilled performance.
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Steps to reproduce
Multimodal data were acquired, including high-fidelity audio (WAV), electroencephalography (EEG), and behavioral metrics. Temporal features were extracted via Audacity (v3.7.0) at millisecond resolution, enabling derivation of gesture and note rates (events/s) per hand. Two expert raters assessed movement complexity at the measure level using a 6-point Likert scale across melodic/harmonic, rhythmic, and executive dimensions. Beat onset times were determined via waveform amplitude rises, allowing for BPM computation per quarter note and per bar; tactus imprecision was quantified accordingly. Statistical analyses included Wilcoxon signed-rank and Sign tests for inter-composer comparisons, and repeated-measures ANOVAs (with Greenhouse-Geisser correction) for beat-level timing variance.
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Additional Metadata for University of Milano - Bicocca
| Language | English |
| Date the data was collected | 2023-02-01T23:00:00.000Z |
| UniMiB Research Centres | Centro di Neuroscienze di Milano |
| ERC Keywords | SH5_5 Music and musicology; history of music, SH4_4 Neuropsychology, LS5_5 Neural bases of cognitive processes (e.g. memory, learning, attention) |
| SSD Classification | M-PSI/02 - PSICOBIOLOGIA E PSICOLOGIA FISIOLOGICA |
| Geolocation | Italy |