Characterizing musical vocal dynamics in performance

Dynamics play a fundamental role in varying the expressivity of any performance. While the usage of this tool can vary from artist to artist, and also from performance to performance, a systematic methodology to derive dynamics in terms of musically meaningful terms like piano, forte etc can offer valuable feedback in the context of vocal music education. To this end, we make use of commercial recordings of some popular rock and pop songs from the Smule vocal balanced dataset and transcribe it with dynamic markings with the help of a music teacher. Further, we compare the dynamics of the source separated original recordings with the aligned karaoke versions to find the variations in dynamics. We compare and present the differences using statistical analysis, with a goal to provide the dynamic markings as guiding tools for students to learn and adapt with a specific interpretation of a piece of music.