A Study on Difficulty Level Recognition of Piano Sheet Music

Looking for a piano sheet music with proper difficulty for a piano learner is always an important work to his/her teacher. In the paper, we study on a new and challenging issue of recognizing the difficulty level of piano sheet music. To analyze the semantic content of music, we focus on symbolic music, i.e., sheet music or score. Specifically, difficulty level recognition is formulated as a regression problem to predict the difficulty level of piano sheet music. Since the existing symbolic music features are not able to capture the characteristics of difficulty, we propose a set of new features. To improve the performance, a feature selection approach, RReliefF, is used to select relevant features. An extensive performance study is conducted over two real datasets with different characteristics to evaluate the accuracy of the regression approach for predicting difficulty level. The best performance evaluated in terms of the R2 statistics over two datasets reaches 39.9% and 38.8%, respectively.