Relationship between pianist's global sonority and hand kinematics

The aim of this article is to establish a link between judgments of a pianist's sound based on listening tests and hand kinematics. The results are based on an experiment in which four pianists played four tunes in different moods simultaneously while their movements and sound were recorded by cameras and artificial heads. A psychoacoustic verbalisation test was carried out on 45 subjects, which served as a reference for the statistical analysis of the movements using the ANOVA technique. Wrist flexion, keypress duration, finger-to-key distance and the speed of the different parts of the fingers were identified as significant parameters for identifying the different piano sonorities. In addition to confirming and complementing the results obtained in different contexts, this study develops and validates a methodology that could be extended to more complex issues.