Approaches to Musical Performance Research: Techniques, Formats, Software
this is the companion website to the workshop "Approaches to Musical Performance Research: Techniques, Formats, Software" held at the Music Encoding Conference 2026 in Tokyo, Japan
by Frithjof Bömcke-Vollmer, Silvan Peter, Patricia Hu, Yucong Jiang, Carlos Cancino-Chacón, Werner Goebl, Lars Engeln, Andreas Münzmay, Johannes Hentschel, David M. Weigl, and Axel Berndt.
Tutorials
Paderborn University: Digital Performance Edition
This part of the workshop will introduce new approaches to creating scholarly digital music editions including musical performances. Focusing on performance as a multimodal phenomenon, the presentation will address the integration of diverse materials involved in the production and documentation of audio productions, including annotated performance scores, instrumental sound characteristics, acoustic environments, and audio post-processing. Particular attention will be given to the representation of performance data as combinations of measurements, symbolic annotations, and intertextual relationships.
The session will further present the workflows, data models, and tools currently being developed within the project, exemplarily focusing on Clifford Curzon’s 1971 DECCA performance of Beethoven’s “Eroica Variations” (Var. XIV). Special emphasis will be placed the close listening tool CritList as well as the interaction between the MEI and MPM formats and tools such as meico and MPM Toolbox. In addition to introducing the underlying concepts and infrastructure, the workshop will discuss practical use cases, current development activities, and future perspectives for digital music editions.
Software download link: MPM Toolbox v0.1.41 (Java), CritList (browser-based).
Apt Java drivers: Mac (v8.401, later versions won’t work) / All other platforms
Data used in demo: MPM TB project: 1971 Clifford Curzon performance of Beethovens op. 35 „Eroica Variations“ (Var. XIV)
More details here: Digital Performance Edition (Project Homepage)
University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna: Signature Sound Vienna
This part of the workshop will present a browser-based digital musicology toolset developed by the Digital Music Research team at the Department of Music Acoustics – Wiener Klangstil, mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. The tools include mei-friend, a user-friendly editor for music encodings; Listen Here!, a Web-based environment for software-assisted close listening; and Primal, a platform for review and interaction with music annotation linked data. The three tools are integrated on the data they process, operating on shared linked-data structures defined by the Music Annotation Ontology (Lewis et al, 2022). Using DTW-based audio-to-audio and score-to-audio alignment techniques, they allow users to precisely compare large collections of audio performance recordings, author annotations on score and audio selections, and publish these for digital musicology dissemination. An end-to-end example of the approach is available in . All processing is done locally on-client (no audio is ever uploaded anywhere), making it easy and safe to use our software on your own recording collections without additional copyright limitations.
Feel free to use your own audio or try the recordings available here. To try out the score alignment, you will need a Web-hosted MEI file hosted at a CORS-compliant link (e.g., a Raw GitHub link starting https://raw.githubusercontent.com). An MEI file matching the provided demo recordings is available here.
University of Richmond: Performance Precision
This part of the workshop will introduce Performance Precision, a new software tool designed to facilitate analysis of music performance recordings alongside their scores. After users load an MEI score and an audio recording (or multiple recordings), the software can automatically align these two media by finding the onset time in the audio for each note in the score. The graphical interface incorporates visual cues for connecting rendered scores and audio, helpful for verifying and refining alignment, and in particular for visualizing performance nuances (e.g., tempo changes). Internally, this tool utilizes the Verovio toolkit to process score-related information.
This segment will focus on demonstrating the key features of the software, example use cases, its relation to other tools in the ecosystem, and current limitations and future directions.
Software download link: Performance Precision v1.3.0 (for Mac or Windows)
Data used in demo: Download data
More details in these papers: SMC2025 and ICMC 2025
Johannes Kepler University: Symbolic Music Group
This part of the workshop will introduce a coding-oriented workflow for computational music performance analysis using the Python libraries partitura, parangonar, mpteval together with the browser-based visualization tool parangonada. The session will focus on reproducible workflows for generating, inspecting, and visualizing alignments and note-level analytical descriptors for performance research.
MATERIALS: Everything needed for the workshop is contained within this interactive colab notebook.
Separately available are the data and slide deck.
Bruckner University: Time to Align
This part of the workshop will address data formats and interoperability between different tools.