Visualization of piano performance and the Piano Pedagogy - A Brief Review of Research since Late 20th Century

Visualization of music performance has been a popular research discipline in recent years, together with the advancement in computer science and software engineering. The major benefits of music visualization include the straightforward demonstration of music features, performer’s skill, and, thus, the capability of precisely analyzing and understanding the music. Meanwhile, the application of music visualization has been expanded from the original animation production into various scenarios including music-teaching activities. Miscellaneous studies have been proposed by different researchers on music visualization and the exploration of its application. On the other hand, being one of the most important and popular music instruments, the piano performance has always been a critical topic in music-related research, while the study on visualization is not an exception. This paper aims to briefly review the research on piano performance visualization since the late 20th century and how it has facilitated the piano teaching activities. The discussion in this paper begins with the development track of music visualization technologies. Next, since most of the music visualizations are based on feature extraction and analysis, the corresponding studies conveyed towards piano performance will be introduced. The application of visualization on the piano teaching activities and its comparison with conventional music teaching will also be discussed. Moreover, considering that music visualization is still at a growing stage, the imitation of current research will also be discussed before the conclusion. The aim of this paper is to provide reference for music researchers.