Research in Computational Expressive Music Performance and Popular Music Production: A Potential Field of Application?

In music, the interpreter manipulates the performance parameters in order to offer a sonic rendition of the piece that is capable of conveying specific expressive intentions. Since the 1980s, there has been growing interest in expressive music performance (EMP) and its computational modeling. This research field has two fundamental objectives: understanding the phenomenon of human musical interpretation and the automatic generation of expressive performances. Rule-based, statistical, machine, and deep learning approaches have been proposed, most of them devoted to the classical repertoire, in particular to piano pieces. On the contrary, we introduce the role of expressive performance within popular music and the contemporary ecology of pop music production based on the use of digital audio workstations (DAWs) and virtual instruments. After an analysis of the tools related to expressiveness commonly available to modern producers, we propose a detailed survey of research into the computational EMP field, highlighting the potential and limits of what is present in the literature with respect to the context of popular music, which by its nature cannot be completely superimposed to the classical one. In the concluding discussion, we suggest possible lines of future research in the field of computational expressiveness applied to pop music.