beethoven_piano_sonatas_comparison

A simple comparison of two digital collections of the Beethoven Piano Sonatas.

View on GitHub

Digital Collections of Beethoven Piano Sonatas

Néstor Nápoles López

This site is a dedicated resource I made presenting a note-by-note comparison between two digital transcriptions of the Beethoven Piano Sonatas:

Both of these resources can be accessed through the corresponding websites or authors.

In this website, I show a comparison of the musical content between these two transcriptions, with the objective of improving the overall quality of both transcriptions.

The main objective is to compare the notes in one transcription to the notes in the other transcription. This serves somewhat as a “peer-review” of both transcriptions with each other and, hopefully, as a wrong-note finder for both transcriptions.

The comparisons were made only at the pitch and duration levels; making sure that the position in the score of one note is the same in both versions. Other attributes (e.g., articulations, dynamics, page layout, etc.) were not compared and are left for future work.

The reason why we care about accurate pitch and duration values is because they have implications for musicians who learn from these scores (i.e., preferrably, they don’t learn the wrong notes), and because most computational music theory models make use of pitch and duration information only. Thus, we consider it valuable to verify whether the notes between these two transcriptions coincide. Doing so, it should be easier to correct any wrong notes in either version.

Files

For this comparison, we only focused on the first movements of each Sonata. Therefore, each of the hyperlinks in the table link to the notes and comparison of the first movements of each Sonata.

Sonata ClassicMan Craig Sapp Diff
No. 1 Notes Notes Comparison
No. 2 Notes Notes Comparison
No. 3 Notes Notes Comparison
No. 4 Notes Notes Comparison
No. 5 Notes Notes Comparison
No. 6 Notes Notes Comparison
No. 7 Notes Notes Comparison
No. 8 Notes Notes Comparison
No. 9 Notes Notes Comparison
No. 10 Notes Notes Comparison
No. 11 Notes Notes Comparison
No. 12 Notes Notes Comparison
No. 13 Notes Notes Comparison
No. 14 Notes Notes Comparison
No. 15 Notes Notes Comparison
No. 16 Notes Notes Comparison
No. 17 Notes Notes Comparison
No. 18 Notes Notes Comparison
No. 19 Notes Notes Comparison
No. 20 Notes Notes Comparison
No. 21 Notes Notes Comparison
No. 22 Notes Notes Comparison
No. 23 Notes Notes Comparison
No. 24 Notes Notes Comparison
No. 25 Notes Notes Comparison
No. 26 Notes Notes Comparison
No. 27 Notes Notes Comparison
No. 28 Notes Notes Comparison
No. 29 Notes Notes Comparison
No. 30 Notes Notes Comparison
No. 31 Notes Notes Comparison
No. 32 Notes Notes Comparison

Methodology

The transcriptions have been encoded in different formats: Humdrum and MusicXML (encoded with MuseScore).

The first step to compare them is to convert them into a similar representation. One of the easiest ways accomplish this is by using the music21 python library. This is what we used for the comparisons.

The parser for Humdrum data in music21 is currently unable to handle some elements of the Humdrum syntax. We overcome this by doing slight changes to the Humdrum files. Particularly: