Nawba recognition for Arab-Andalusian music using templates from music scores

Abstract

The Arab-Andalusian music is performed through nawab¯at (plural of nawba), suites of instrumental and vocal pieces ordered according to their metrical pattern in a sequence of increasing tempo. This study presents for the first time in literature a system for automatic recognition of nawba for audio recordings of the Moroccan tradition of Arab- Andalusian music. The proposed approach relies on template matching applied to pitch distributions computed from audio recordings. The templates have been created using a data-driven approach, utilizing a score collection categorized into nawab¯at. This methodology has been tested on a dataset of 58 hours of music: a set of 77 recordings in eleven nawab¯at from the Arab-Andalusian corpus collected within the CompMusic project and stored in Dunya platform. An accuracy of 75% on the nawba recognition task is reported using Euclidean distance (L2) as distance metric in the template matching.