Curating and annotating a collection of traditional Irish flute recordings to facilitate stylistic analysis

This paper presents the curation and annotation of a collection of traditional Irish flute recordings to facilitate the analysis of stylistic characteristics. We introduce the structure of Irish tunes, types of tunes and the ornamentation, which is a decisive stylistic determinant in Irish traditional music. We identify seminal recordings of prominent flute players and provide information related to players and their style and geographical context. We describe the process of manual annotation of the audio data. The annotations consist of the onsets of notes, note frequency and identity of notes and ornaments. We also present initial stylistic analysis of individual players in terms of ornamentation and phrasing and provide a variety of statistics for the data. The ability to accurately represent and analyse stylistic features such as ornaments allow for the development of discourse related to several key ethnomusicological questions surrounding music making, musical heritage and cultural change

Underdetermined DOA Estimation via Independent Component Analysis and Time-Frequency Masking

This paper presents an algorithm for the estimation of the direction of arrival (DOA) in underdetermined situations, that is, there is more sources than sensors. The algorithm performs the estimation in an iterative manner, each iteration consists of two-steps: first estimation of the DOA of a dominant source via the Independent Component Analysis and then removal of the detected source from the mixture via time-frequency masking. Experiments, performed using speech signals mixed in real environment when only two microphones are used but three and four sources are present, demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can estimate the DOAs more accurately than two previously used underdetermined DOA algorithms

Towards the creation of digital library content to study aspects of style in Irish traditional music

This paper presents our initial work on collection of recordings and related metadata with a view to the creation of digital library content for analysis of stylistic characteristics in Irish traditional music. We focus on ornamentation as this is a decisive stylistic determinant in Irish traditional music. The digital library contains a collection of audio recordings of prominent Irish flute players and metadata related to these recordings, such as manual annotation of onsets and offsets, identity of notes and ornaments, information related to performers and performers' style and make and type of instrument used