Abstract
We model expressive timing for a phrase in performed classical music as being dependent on two factors: the expressive timing in the previous phrase and the position of the phrase within the piece. We present a model selection test for evaluating candidate models that assert different dependencies for deciding the Cluster of Expressive Timing (CET) for a phrase. We use cross entropy and Kullback Leibler (KL) divergence to evaluate the resulting models: with these criteria we find that both the expressive timing in the previous phrase and the position of the phrase in the music score affect expressive timing in a phrase. The results show that the expressive timing in the previous phrase has a greater effect on timing choices than the position of the phrase, as the phrase position only impacts the choice of expressive timing in combination with the choice of expressive timing in the previous phrase.