Partners

• University College Ghent, Faculty of Music
• Institute of Psychoacoustics and Electronic Music

featured

~ Dataset

The dataset we use is the sound archive of the department of Ethnomusicology of the Royal Museum for Central Africa at Tervuren, Belgium. The archive was digitized during the DEKKMMA project. More information about the dataset can be foun on the website of the DEKKMMA project:

The archive is a collection of sound recordings of traditional music from Central Africa, with a particular focus on Congo and Rwanda. The sound archive contains about 3,000 hours of music recordings, the oldest of which date from 1910: Edison cylinders recorded by Hutereau in the Uele-province in Congo.

The archive contains several sound carriers (Edison cylinders, Sonofil wire, magnetic tapes, audiocassettes, disks, CD’s …) with associated metadata (paper files) and contextual data (photographs, films, video’s, books, documents of all kind).

The collection was created during and after the colonial era of the Belgian Kingdom in Central Africa. The RMCA collection forms for an important part the musical memory of Central Africa and in terms of size, documentation and musical quality, it is – without any doubt – the world’s most important sound archive for this region.

Using the meta data we did a rough geocoding of each recording to create an interactive map of the dataset.

Dataset

Computational ethnomusicology

dataset_geocodes.html

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

IPEM logo

Royal Museum for Central Africa logo

Faculty of Music logo

Computational ethnomusicology en Music Information Retrieval