A method for tonic frequency identification of Turkish Makam music recordings

Abstract

Karar is the final tone in the Turkish makam music performances. The karar frequency, hence the concert pitch varies among performances due to the existence of many diapasons in Turkish makam music, instead of a single standard one. Correct estimation of the karar frequency is critical for many computational tasks such as tuning analysis, audo-score alignment and automatic trascription. We present a new karar frequency identification method that is based on detecting the last note in the recording and estimating its frequency. The method is applied on two large datasets of Turkish makam music recordings and shown to outperform the state-of-the-art.