About the Emotional Piano Project

Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier is a collection of 48 pieces written in 1722 by Johann Sebastian Bach. It is split between Preludes and Fugues and has a Major and Minor key piece for every pitch. It was written as a sort of learning study for the harpsichord, clavichord, and piano.

One of the major projects of the Maple Lab is focused on exploring how music connects with emotion and communication. Music shares many communicative parallels, for instance happiness is conveyed in both speech and music by an increased rate of articulation. The Well-Tempered Clavier offers a very unique dataset to work with as not only does it balances across key and chroma, but because Bach did not write down preferred tempo markings (as such a thing did not exist at the time), people are free to interpret how fast or slow they should play the pieces for themselves. Many performers have recorded their own performances of the entire set, and many editors over the years have republished the work with their own preferred tempo markings. This creates a huge set of data to research and explore any patterns that may lie within.

This project was based on a larger research project in the MAPLE Lab exploring music and emotion.