Note: This bibliographic page is archived and will no longer be updated. For an up-to-date list of publications from the Music Technology Group see the Publications list .

A Method for Structural Analysis of Ottoman-Turkish Makam Music Scores

Title A Method for Structural Analysis of Ottoman-Turkish Makam Music Scores
Publication Type Conference Paper
Year of Publication 2016
Conference Name 6th International Workshop on Folk Music Analysis (FMA 2016)
Authors Şentürk, S. , & Serra X.
Pagination 39-46
Conference Start Date 15/06/2016
Publisher Dublin Institute of Technology
Conference Location Dublin, Ireland
Abstract From a computational perspective, structural analysis of Ottoman-Turkish makam music (OTMM) is a research topic that has not been addressed thoroughly. In this paper we propose a method, which processes machine-readable music scores of OTMM to extract and semiotically describe the melodic and lyrical organization of the music piece automatically using basic string similarity and graph analysis techniques. The proposed method is used to identify around 50000 phrases in 1300 music scores and 21500 sections in 1770 scores, respectively. The obtained information may be useful for relevant research in music education and musicology, and it has already been used to aid several computational tasks such as music score content validation, digital music engraving and audio-score alignment.
preprint/postprint document http://hdl.handle.net/10230/32890
Final publication http://arrow.dit.ie/fema/16/
Additional material:

Source code of the method is integrated in symbtrdataextractor package, release v2.1.0 .

The source code and the binary of the automatic phrase segmentation is in the v1.0-alpha.1 release of makam-symbolic-phrase-segmentation package. We use the phrase annotations of E xpert 1 in the training data hosted in symbolic-phrase-segmentation-dataset v1.0 .

The experiments and results to select the optimal melodic and lyrical similarity as well as t he test dataset is hosted at github .

Using the optimal similarity threshold of 0.7, we extracted the 21569 sections from 1771 score and 49259 phrases from 1345 scores in the SymbTr score collection v2.4.2 . This collection is currently the biggest and the most representative machine-readable score collection of Ottoman-Turkish makam music. The extracted structural information as well as the other score (meta)data obtained via automatic description is available in turkish_makam_corpus_stats .

We have also been using the structural information (section information to be specific) in several applications:

  1. Automatic SymbTr-score content validation using Travis CI.
  2. Adding section information automatically during score conversion from txt to MusicXML and MusicXML to Lilypond formats.
  3. Audio-score alignment and enhanced playback in Dunya-makam, the prototype music discovery tool developed within CompMusic project.