Data Generation and Multi-Modal Analysis for Recorded Operatic Performance

Abstract

Commercial recordings of live opera performance are only sporadically available, mostly due to various legal protections held by opera houses. The resulting onsite, archive-only access for them inhibits analysis of the creative process in "live" environments. Based on a technique I developed for generating performance data from copyright protected archival recordings, this paper presents a means of interrogating the creative practice in individual operatic performances and across the corpus of a recorded performance history. My analysis uses "In questa Reggia" from Giacomo Puccini's Turandot as performed at New York's Metropolitan Opera. The first part of my analysis builds on tempo mapping developed by the Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music. Given the natural relationship in which performances of the same work exist, statistical and network analyses of the data extracted from a corpus of performances offer ways to contextualize and understand how performances create a tradition to which and through which they relate to varying degrees.