The Role of Performance Practices on the Perception of Similarity in Musical Arrangements

Many pieces from the canon of Western classical music have been recorded by a variety of performers, often representing a wide spectrum of performance styles. Various factors, such as playing technique, stylistics, or instrumentation, influence the perceived musical similarity – or dissimilarity – between various recordings of one composition. The present study investigated the perceived dissimilarities of two melody sequences, using Bach's second Brandenburg Concerto as an example. The collected data were analyzed using weighted multidimensional scaling (INDSCAL), with which the dissimilarities of the pairwise tested melody sequences were represented as distances between spatial coordinates. In addition, acoustic features were extracted from the melody sequences to interpret the resulting INDSCAL dimensions. The results showed that participants shared the same perceptual space in terms of similarity assessment and were implicitly guided in their judgment by the respective instrumentation and musical design. Furthermore, melody sequences were perceived as more similar when they shared the same spectral properties. The present work extends the current state of research regarding the similarity assessment of different musical interpretations, with a specific consideration of Romantic and historically informed performance practices. Furthermore, this study provides the basis for further studies on the perceived similarity of cover versions of popular music, studio vs. live recordings, or electric vs. acoustic recordings and their evaluation. Future research should therefore consider a larger number and variety of stimuli and be performed under more controlled acoustic conditions.