Arab-Andalusian music was formed in the medieval Islamic
territories of the Iberian Peninsula, drawing on local
traditions and assuming Arabic influences. The expert
performer and researcher of the Moroccan tradition of
this music, Amin Chaachoo, is developing a theory whose
last formulation was recently published in La Musique
Hispano-Arabe, al-Ala (2016), which argues that centonization,
a melodic composition technique used in Gregorian
chant, was also utilized for the creation of this ...
Arab-Andalusian music was formed in the medieval Islamic
territories of the Iberian Peninsula, drawing on local
traditions and assuming Arabic influences. The expert
performer and researcher of the Moroccan tradition of
this music, Amin Chaachoo, is developing a theory whose
last formulation was recently published in La Musique
Hispano-Arabe, al-Ala (2016), which argues that centonization,
a melodic composition technique used in Gregorian
chant, was also utilized for the creation of this repertoire.
In this paper we aim to contribute to Chaachoo’s theory
by means of tf-idf analysis. A high-order n-gram model
is applied to a corpus of 149 prescriptive transcriptions
of heterophonic recordings, representing each as an unordered
multiset of patterns. Computing the tf-idf statistic
of each pattern in this corpus provides a means by which
we can rank and compare motivic content across nawab¯at,
distinct musical forms of the tradition. For each nawba,
an empirical comparison is made between patterns identified
as significant via our approach and those proposed by
Chaachoo. Ultimately we observe considerable agreement
between the two pattern sets and go further in proposing
new, unique and as yet undocumented patterns that occur
at least as frequently and with at least as much importance
as those in Chaachoo’s proposals.
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