The Vienna 4x22 Piano Corpus

In January and February 1999, 22 professional pianists from Vienna performed four excerpts from the Classic-Romantic repertoire by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Schubert, and Frédéric Chopin on a SE290 computer-controlled Imperial piano by the Viennese piano manufacturer Bösendorfer. The pianists were advanced performance students and professors from the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. They were given the scores several days ahead of the recording session to allow to prepare their performances. The recording took place in an approximately 6-by-6-meters studio at the Bösendorfer piano company (Graf-Starhemberg-Straße 14, 1040 Vienna, building demolished in 2012). After a familiarization phase with the piano, the pianists were asked to perform complete takes of each of the four excerpts until they were satisfied with a final version. The four piece excerpts were: bars 1–21 from Chopin's Etude in E major Op. 10, No. 3 ; bars 1–45 from Chopin's Ballade in F major Op. 38; Schubert's Deutscher Tanz in f minor D.783 No. 15; and bars 1–18 from Mozart's Sonata in A major K.331, first movement. The performance was recorded by the SE290 system in its proprietary and encrypted format, resulting in a file triplet (.KB, .LP, .SP) which was converted to a standard MIDI format using Bösendorfer's own SE software. The sound of the imperial grand piano was recorded onto
digital audio tape (DAT) by a portable Tascam DA-P1 recorder using two AKG CK91 microphones placed in ORTF stereo technique towards the open lid of the piano. The MIDI files were converted to text and subsequently matched to the symbolic scores, resulting in match files, a text-based format created by Gerhard Widmer et al in 1998. More details about the recording and matching procedures can be found in Goebl (1999). URL: http://iwk.mdw.ac.at/goebl/papers/Goebl1999-Diplomarbeit.pdf (retrieved 30/Jan/2017).