Development and Application of MIR Techniques on Contemporary Classical and Ethnic Music

Summary

While practising ethnomusicological research on a large dataset we try to develop useful software for the (ethno)musicological research community. We want to create user friendly software that provides culture independent processing of MIR-features such as pitch, tempo and timbre.

For the moment we are focusing on pitch related information such as tone scales. Tone scales of different cultures are hard to compare using a universal language. The typical sound of a musical tradition is based on its individual characteristics, its own language. Most pitch related software is geared towards tonal, well-tempered music and uses western concepts, jargon. The idea behind Tarsos is to use pitch tracking algorithms to identify defining tone scale features and to visualize, export those features in a culture independent manner. E.g. by using pitch class histograms.

In the following years tempo and timbre will receive a similar treatment.

Keywords

Pitch tracking – Sound Analysis – Culture Independent Processing of MIR annotations – Computational Ethnomusicology.

Partners

• University College Ghent – Faculty of Music
• IPEM: The Institute for Psychoacoustics and Electronic Music is a research center for musicology in Belgium. IPEM belongs to the Music department at the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, at Ghent University.
• Royal Museum for Central Africa at Tervuren – Belgium provides us with the dataset generated during the DEKKMMA project.

There is also a project page available in the research information system: Toepassing van Music Information Retrieval technieken op hedendaags klassieke en etnische muziek

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Computational ethnomusicology en Music Information Retrieval