Czerny uber alles

I think we should develop a corpus of Czerny's published fingerings and use it as an initial source of ground truth. To assist in this effort we will first flesh out the ideas of editorial conventions and full specifications and use these principals to create an MDC5 (abcDE) with partial input and auto-complete features. Then we see how hard it is to annotate WTC.

Then Op. 821 and The Little Pianist.

Null hypotheses

1. There is no correlation between gender and fingering preferences.
2. There is no correlation between hand size and fingering preferences.
3. There is no correlation between scale fingering preferences and fingering preferences of non-scale musical fragments.
4. There is no correlation between fingerings of one Parncutt fragment and another.
5. Editorial fingering suggestions have no effect on fingering preferences.
6. There is no correlation between fingering preferences and Hanon practice.
7. There is no correlation between fingering preferences and technical study practice.
8. There is no correlation between the age of the pianist and fingering preferences.
9. There is no correlation between average pivot count in subject fingerings and fingering "difficulty" (variability).
10. There is no correlation between pitch span within a fragment and fingering "difficulty" (variability).

2016-01-20 status

Done

Data Collection

• Created new feature-rich manual data collection tool (formerly MDC5 but now rechristened abcDE) to allow input of partial fingering information.
• Created detailed help page for same.
• Defined file format, abcD, and implemented its recognition by the new editor.
• Defined abcDF grammar for fingering sequences.
• Created parser for abcDF.
• Defined public interface to abcDE JavaScript library.
• Deployed abcDE to nlp.cs.uic.edu.
• Completed initial descriptive statistics for survey data.
• Wrote script to identify note-wise fingering "consensus" in Survey I data.

 Doing

1. Drafting paper for ISMIR 2016 to describe abcDE.
2. Performing Chi Square analysis of exploratory dataset to correlate abbreviated Parncutt fingerings with gender, reach, age, Hanon usage, technical practice, preparation actions, injury, etc.
3. Looking at how well selecting fingering a in Exercise A predicts selecting fingering b in Exercise B. That is, do people have common patterns of fingering preference?
4. Evaluating Tableau for easier (and richer) data visualization. (SQLite support missing for OS X.)

Struggling

• What? Me worry?