DYNAMIC-PROGRAMMING FOR THE ANALYSIS OF SERIAL BEHAVIORS

Studies of breakdowns in music performance can provide rich informatio n about the planning activities required for music performance, as wel l as offer significant advantages over studies of skilled performance in other domains (Palmer & van de Sande, 1993). Yet despite the potent ial benefits, documented evidence of errors in music performance is sc arce, primarily because of methodological limitations. One important p ractical problem that arises is how to find a correspondence between t he actual performance and the score, or intended performance. When per formances are long and complex, with potentially many errors, matching a performance to a musical score becomes a nontrivial task. This pape r describes an algorithm for this task, developed in the context of a study of music production errors. The solution to the problem utilizes dynamic programming techniques and runs in polynomial time.