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Estimating the Makam of Polyphonic Music Signals: Template-Matching vs. Class-Modeling

Title Estimating the Makam of Polyphonic Music Signals: Template-Matching vs. Class-Modeling
Publication Type Master Thesis
Year of Publication 2010
Authors Ioannidis, L.
preprint/postprint document static/media/Ioannidis-Leonidas-Master-Thesis-2010.pdf
Abstract

This thesis provides an investigation on the problem of scale estimation in the context of non-Western music cultures and more specific the makam scales found in Turkey and Middle-East countries. The automatic description of music from traditions that do not follow the Western notation and theory needs specifically designed tools. We evaluate two approaches that have successfully dealt with same problem in Western music, but approaching the matter without considering Western pitch-classes. To accomplish the task of classifying musical pieces from the „makam world‟, according to their scale, we used chroma features extracted from polyphonic music signals. The first method based on template-matching techniques compares the extracted features with a set of makam templates, while the second one uses trained classifiers. Both approaches provided good results (F-measure=0.69 and 0.73 respectively) on a collection of 289 pieces from 9 makam families.

Evaluation measures were computed to clarify the performance of both models, error analyses showed that certain confusions were musically coherent and that these techniques could complement each other in this particular context.