Automatic transcription of traditional Turkish art music recordings: A computational ethnomusicology appraoach

Thesis (Doctoral)--Izmir Institute of Technology, Electronics and Communication Engineering, Izmir, 2012Includes bibliographical references (leaves: 96-109)Text in English; Abstract: Turkish and Englishxi, 131 leavesMusic Information Retrieval (MIR) is a recent research field, as an outcome of the revolutionary change in the distribution of, and access to the music recordings. Although MIR research already covers a wide range of applications, MIR methods are primarily developed for western music. Since the most important dimensions of music are fundamentally different in western and non-western musics, developing MIR methods for non-western musics is a challenging task. On the other hand, the discipline of ethnomusicology supplies some useful insights for the computational studies on nonwestern musics. Therefore, this thesis overcomes this challenging task within the framework of computational ethnomusicology, a new emerging interdisciplinary research domain. As a result, the main contribution of this study is the development of an automatic transcription system for traditional Turkish art music (Turkish music) for the first time in the literature. In order to develop such system for Turkish music, several subjects are also studied for the first time in the literature which constitute other contributions of the thesis: Automatic music transcription problem is considered from the perspective of ethnomusicology, an automatic makam recognition system is developed and the scale theory of Turkish music is evaluated computationally for nine makamlar in order to understand whether it can be used for makam detection. Furthermore, there is a wide geographical region such as Middle-East, North Africa and Asia sharing similarities with Turkish music. Therefore our study would also provide more relevant techniques and methods than the MIR literature for the study of these non-western musics

A MIDI project for the analysis of Turkish music performances

Müzik teknolojisi alanındaki bu çalışmamız Türk müziği icralarının MIDI formatına dönüştürülmesi yöntemini uygulamalı örneklerle birlikte açıklamaktadır. MIDI formatı yaygın olarak batı müzikleri için kullanılan simgesel bir müzik temsil formatı olmasına karşılık içerdiği perde kaydırma (pitch bend) işlevi sayesinde, Türk müziği gibi Batı müziğinin 12 ton eşit yedirimli ses sisteminden farklı ses sistemlerini de temsil edebilme kapasitesine sahiptir. Bu anlamda Türk müziği'nin MIDI formatıyla temsil edilmesi çeşitli çalışmalarda gerçekleştirilmiş ve kendi başına herhangi bir yenilik içermemektedir. Diğer yandan bu tür çalışmalarda MIDI'nin temsil ettiği şey notası yazılı olan eserlerdir. Oysa Türk müziği icralarının notasyon ile ilişkisinin problemli olduğu bilinmektedir. Kısaca kuram ve icra arasındaki farklılıklar nedeniyle notasyon ile temsil edilemeyen per- deler vardır. Bu nedenle bu çalışmanın özgünlüğü icradaki perde zenginliğini MIDI formatında nasıl temsil edilebileceğini göstermesidir. Böylece bu çalışmada Türk müziği üzerine araştırmalarda kullanılabilecek yeni bir araç tanımlanmıştır. Our study within the domain of Music Technology presents the method of writing Turkish music performances in MIDI format by applied samples. Althouh MIDI format is a kind of symbolic representation of music widely used for Western music, the pitch bend function enables MIDI to represent musics which do not have 12 tone equal tempered tuning sysytem such as Turkish music. In this sense representation of Turkish music in MIDI format has been achieved in various studies. On the other hand only the notation of pieces were represented in such studies. It is well known that the relation between the notation and performance has serious problems. Briefly there exists pitches performed in Turkish music which have no correspondence in notation. Therefore, contribution of our study is the presentation of the richness of pitches in per- formances by writing them in MIDI format. Finally, this new tool can be used for the ethnomusicological and educational studies on Turkish music