An open corpus for the computational research of Arab-Andalusian music

Abstract

In the medieval Islamic territories of the Iberian Peninsula known as Al-Andalus a unique style of music was formed combining local practices with Arab sensibilities. After the fall of the last Andalusian kingdom, this classical repertoire has been preserved to the present in North African countries. The idiosyncrasies of this repertoire, which combines musical traits from Western and Eastern Mediterranean traditions in orchestral and choral settings, as well as instrumental and vocal solos, deserves an in depth musicological study, that can benefit from computational tools for corpusdriven research. On the other hand, the characteristics of this music poses interesting challenges to MIR methods and therefore offer new research opportunities to this field. To address these topics, we present here the first complete release of the corpus for the research of the Moroccan tradition of Arab-Andalusian music built in the framework of the CompMusic project. The corpus comprises three data collections, namely audio recordings, music scores and lyrics, as well as related annotations and metadata. We also present a series of Jupyter Notebooks for browsing and retrieving data from the corpus. Both the corpus and notebooks are completely open to the research community.