An approach for linking score and audio recordings in Makam music of Turkey

Abstract

The main information sources to study a particular piece of music are symbolic scores and audio recordings. These are complementary representations of the piece and it is/nvery useful to have a proper linking between the two of the musically meaningful events. For the case of makam music of Turkey, linking the available scores with the corresponding/naudio recordings requires taking the specificities of this music into account, such as the particular tunings, the extensive usage of non-notated expressive elements, and the way in which the performer repeats fragments/nof the score. Moreover, for most of the pieces of the classical repertoire, there is no score written by the original composer. In this paper, we propose a methodology to pair sections of a score to the corresponding fragments of audio recording performances. The pitch information obtained from both sources is used as the common representation/nto be paired. From an audio recording, fundamental frequency estimation and tuning analysis is done to compute a pitch contour. From the corresponding score, symbolic note names and durations are converted to a synthetic/npitch contour. Then, a linking operation is performed between these pitch contours in order to find the best correspondences./nThe method is tested on a dataset of 11 compositions spanning 44 audio recordings, which are mostly monophonic. An F3-score of 82% and 89% are obtained with automatic and semi-automatic karar detection respectively,/nshowing that the methodology may give us a needed tool for further computational tasks such as form analysis, audio-score alignment and makam recognition.