Characterization of Embellishments in Ney Performances of Makam Music in Turkey

The embellishments of makam music in Turkey are an inherent characteristic of the music rather than a separate expressive resource, thus their understanding is essential to characterize this music. We do a computational study, in which we analyze audio recordings of 8 widely acknowledged Turkish ney players covering the period from the year 1920 to 2000. From the extracted fundamental frequency, we manually segment and identify 327 separate embellishments of the types vibrato and kaydırma. We analyze them and characterize the behavior of two features that help us differentiate performance styles, namely vibrato rate change and pitch bump. Also we compare these embellishments with the ones used in Western classical music. With our approach, we have an explicit and formalized way to understand ney embellishments, which is a step towards the automatic characterization of makam music in Turkey.