The Aesthetics of Motion in Musics for the Mevlana Celal ed-Din Rumi

This dissertation investigates the concept of motion as a fundamental aesthetic element in the devotional music, dance, and rituals performed in honor of the celebrated thirteenth-century Persian mystic poet and saint, the Mevlana Celal ed-Din Muhammad Rumi. The main focus of the study is threefold. First, it investigates the prevalence of the notion of movement in Islamic music and culture, specifically within the Sufi communities of Turkey, in order to arrive at a broader understanding of the relationship between music, aesthetics, and worldview. Secondly, it explores how musical performance functions as a form of devotion or religious worship by focusing on the musical repertories performed in honor of a single holy figure, the Mevlana Rumi. Finally, it provides an ethnographic account of contemporary developments in Sufi musical culture in Turkey and across the world by describing the recent activities of the Mevlana's devotees, which includes members of the Mevlevi Order of Islamic mystics as well as adherents of other Sufi brotherhoods and followers of so-called New Religions or New Age. The primary research for this study involved two short one-month field trips to Turkey and India in 2002 and 2003, respectively, and a longer one year expedition to Turkey in 2004 and 2005, which also included shorter stays in Cyprus, Syria, and Egypt. Additionally, the dissertation draws directly from critical theories advanced in the fields of ethnomusicology, cultural anthropology, and ethnochoreology and focuses on the kinesthetic parameters of music, dance, trance, and ritual as well as on broader forms of socio-cultural movement including pilgrimage, cultural tourism, and globalization. These forms of movement are analyzed in four broad categories of music used in worship, including classical Mevlevi music, music of the zikr ceremony, popular musics, and non-Turkish musics

Automatic music transcription: challenges and future directions

Automatic music transcription is considered by many to be a key enabling technology in music signal processing. However, the performance of transcription systems is still significantly below that of a human expert, and accuracies reported in recent years seem to have reached a limit, although the field is still very active. In this paper we analyse limitations of current methods and identify promising directions for future research. Current transcription methods use general purpose models which are unable to capture the rich diversity found in music signals. One way to overcome the limited performance of transcription systems is to tailor algorithms to specific use-cases. Semi-automatic approaches are another way of achieving a more reliable transcription. Also, the wealth of musical scores and corresponding audio data now available are a rich potential source of training data, via forced alignment of audio to scores, but large scale utilisation of such data has yet to be attempted. Other promising approaches include the integration of information from multiple algorithms and different musical aspects

Computational Modelling and Analysis of Vibrato and Portamento in Expressive Music Performance

PhD, 148ppVibrato and portamento constitute two expressive devices involving continuous pitch modulation and is widely employed in string, voice, wind music instrument performance. Automatic extraction and analysis of such expressive features form some of the most important aspects of music performance research and represents an under-explored area in music information retrieval. This thesis aims to provide computational and scalable solutions for the automatic extraction and analysis of performed vibratos and portamenti. Applications of the technologies include music learning, musicological analysis, music information retrieval (summarisation, similarity assessment), and music expression synthesis. To automatically detect vibratos and estimate their parameters, we propose a novel method based on the Filter Diagonalisation Method (FDM). The FDM remains robust over short time frames, allowing frame sizes to be set at values small enough to accurately identify local vibrato characteristics and pinpoint vibrato boundaries. For the determining of vibrato presence, we test two alternate decision mechanisms—the Decision Tree and Bayes’ Rule. The FDM systems are compared to state-of-the-art techniques and obtains the best results. The FDM’s vibrato rate accuracies are above 92.5%, and the vibrato extent accuracies are about 85%. We use the Hidden Markov Model (HMM) with Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) to detect portamento existence. Upon extracting the portamenti, we propose a Logistic Model for describing portamento parameters. The Logistic Model has the lowest root mean squared error and the highest adjusted Rsquared value comparing to regression models employing Polynomial and Gaussian functions, and the Fourier Series. The vibrato and portamento detection and analysis methods are implemented in AVA, an interactive tool for automated detection, analysis, and visualisation of vibrato and portamento. Using the system, we perform crosscultural analyses of vibrato and portamento differences between erhu and violin performance styles, and between typical male or female roles in Beijing opera singing

Nostalgia, emotionality, and ethno-regionalsim in Pontic parakathi singing

This dissertation explores the multilayered connections between music, emotionality, social and cultural belonging, collective memory, and identity discourse. The ethnographic case study for the examination of all these relations and aspects is the Pontic muhabeti or parakathi. Parakathi refers to a practice of socialization and music making that is designated insider Pontic Greek. It concerns primarily Pontic Greeks or Pontians, the descendants of the 1922 refugees from Black Sea Turkey (Gr. Pontos), and their identity discourse of ethno-regionalism. Parakathi references nightlong sessions of friendly socialization, social drinking, and dialogical participatory singing that take place informally in coffee houses, taverns, and households. Parakathi performances are reputed for their strong Pontic aesthetics, traditional character, rich and aesthetically refined repertoire, and intense emotionality. Singing in parakathi performances emerges spontaneously from verbal socialization and emotional saturation. Singing is described as a confessional expression of deeply personal feelings and memories that ideally entails the sharing of pain. Sharing and expression of memories, personal feelings, and pain take place through the dialogical performance of short poetic forms, distichs, sung to riff-like tunes played by the Pontic fiddle, the lyra. This dissertation documents the poetics, aesthetics, rhetorics, and pragmatics of the intimate emotional socialization, nostalgic remembering, and participatory dialogical singing that characterize parakathi and illustrates how these processes negotiate the broader discourses of ethnicity, nationalism, and regionalism that contextualize Pontic Greek senses of belonging. This analysis demonstrates the musical limits of discursivity, the special connection between music and emotion, the significance of music for imagined communities of sentiment, and the importance of musical performance in the cultural negotiations of collective memory, subjectivity, and emotionality. It also provides important information about the aesthetics, styles, structures, and genres of Pontic music, which remain rather understudied, contributing to the expansion of the ethnomusicological field

The Performance and Patronage of Baloch Culture through Music (and Related Arts) in the Eastern Arabian Peninsula

This dissertation is a study of Baloch musical—and ritual—idioms as cultivated (and variously innovated, embellished, patronized, and reconstructed) in the relatively prosperous and cosmopolitan urban environments of the coastal Eastern Arabian Peninsula—the third major concentration of Baloch population after Balochistan and Karachi. Due to historical and geographic particulars, the origins of Peninsular Baloch communities lie primarily in the Makran region that extends along the Arabian Sea coast and across the political boundary separating Iran and Pakistan. If musical activities play a significant role in orienting Baloch communities socially and politically, what are the presentational strategies implied in the foregrounding of specific performance genres and how do social dynamics structure the relationships between performers, patrons, connoisseurs, poets, and publics? Relying on data from a series of fieldwork residencies from 2014-2017 in Oman, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar, I give close attention to the internal diversity in values, outlooks, and expressive domains found within Baloch communities as well as to relationships between Baloch and the other cultural groups that contribute to the demographic make-up of the region. In addition to its focus on musical genres and aesthetics, this is a multidimensional study of intellectual and literary activity. As cultural activism, the patronage and promotion of musical idioms is central to preserving and amplifying a traditionalist cultural consciousness as well as to framing impassioned contemporary political expression. This dissertation contributes to extant studies of Makrani Baloch music and culture and speaks to a growing interest in the political and ethnographic character of Baloch society in the Gulf states, adding an in-depth study of cultural performance to the handful of survey articles by distinguished scholars (Jahani 2014, Peterson 2013, al-Ameeri 2003). This work also contributes substantially to ethnomusicological scholarship on the Persian Gulf region as a complex and highly interactive sphere of culture and can be counted as one of many projects that address flows of culture that intersect in different ways across the Indian Ocean

Characterization of embellishments in ney performances of makam music in Turkey

The embellishments of makam music in Turkey are an/ninherent characteristic of the music rather than a separate/nexpressive resource, thus their understanding is essential to/ncharacterize this music. We do a computational study, in/nwhich we analyze audio recordings of 8 widely acknowledged/nTurkish ney players covering the period from the/nyear 1920 to 2000. From the extracted fundamental frequency,/nwe manually segment and identify 327 separate/nembellishments of the types vibrato and kaydırma. We analyze/nthem and characterize the behavior of two features/nthat help us differentiate performance styles, namely vibrato/nrate change and pitch bump. Also we compare these/nembellishments with the ones used in Western classical/nmusic. With our approach, we have an explicit and formalized/nway to understand ney embellishments, which is a/nstep towards the automatic characterization of makam music/nin Turkey

Urban Ethnomusicology in the City of Thessaloniki (Greece): The Case of Rebetiko Song Revival Today

This thesis is an ethnography of contemporary rebetiko music performance contexts in the city of Thessaloniki. It is the outcome of a research experience I underwent during the years 1997-98 in Ano Poli, a state-declared 'conservation' area of the city. The ethnography is organized in three case studies, each one representing a different performance context: (a) rebetiko concerts held in an 'ethnic' cafe bar, (b) a rebetiko taverna and, (c) a special rebetiko ghlendi (‘revelry') event. These case studies are current expressions of rebetiko entertainment, upon which my discussion of the ongoing revival of the genre in Greek society today is primarily based. My main concern in the thesis is to discuss how people make sense of and communicate rebetiko music culture as a lived experience in different contemporary rebetiko venues. To that extent, the knowledge of revivalist culture is grounded on the aesthetics and discourses which are 'other-ing' rebetiko music today. Eventually, such discourses and aesthetics provide the means for the theoretical discussion of the ways the genre is experienced as 'world music' in certain entertainment settings. These questions are explored within the broader framework of postmodern socio-cultural transformations, which appear to condition variously the contemporary revivalist culture. The ethnography is additionally underpinned with an introductory part that aims to describe the genre and provide a brief review of rebetiko history and associated rhetorics. Overall, there are two mam ethnographic orientations featured in this ethnography concerning the processes of doing fieldwork, as well as thinking and writing about it. One is the fact that I am a native researcher, born and grown up in the 'field'; the other being that this is an urban ethnography bearing the particularities and complex networks of city culture. Finally, this thesis is not just a current ethnography of rebetiko music; it becomes an ethnographic embodiment of the multiple dynamics of reflexivity defining the process of doing urban ethnomusicology at home

Characterization of embellishments in ney performances of makam music in Turkey

The embellishments of makam music in Turkey are an/ninherent characteristic of the music rather than a separate/nexpressive resource, thus their understanding is essential to/ncharacterize this music. We do a computational study, in/nwhich we analyze audio recordings of 8 widely acknowledged/nTurkish ney players covering the period from the/nyear 1920 to 2000. From the extracted fundamental frequency,/nwe manually segment and identify 327 separate/nembellishments of the types vibrato and kaydırma. We analyze/nthem and characterize the behavior of two features/nthat help us differentiate performance styles, namely vibrato/nrate change and pitch bump. Also we compare these/nembellishments with the ones used in Western classical/nmusic. With our approach, we have an explicit and formalized/nway to understand ney embellishments, which is a/nstep towards the automatic characterization of makam music/nin Turkey