An Automatic Pitch Analysis Method for Turkish Maqam Music

Abstract

Automatic pitch analysis of large audio databases is essential for studies on music information retrieval and developing a pitch scale theory for Turkish maqam music. However no such study is available. In this article, we first determine the main obstacle as the alignment of frequency analysis results from multiple files. We then propose a new method to automatically detect the tonic of a recording, align the data, and estimate overall frequency histograms from large databases. We show that such histograms can be successfully used for pitch scale (tuning) studies on the recordings of Tanburi Cemil Bey, an undisputed master of the genre.

Acknowledgement

This work is supported by Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey, TÜBİTAK (Project No: 107E024).

Notes

¹A recent congress was completely dedicated to this topic: “Theory-application mismatch for Turkish Music: Problems and Solutions”, organized by Istanbul Technical University, State Conservatory for Turkish Music, 3–6 March 2008, İstanbul.

² Ahenk is synonymous with key transposition or diapason. Due to the fact that maqam music notes (“perde”s) are named by reference to their relative positions, the same perde corresponds to different pitches on different sizes of instruments. The reader is referred to Erguner (2007) and Appendix B of Yarman (2008) for detailed reviews on ahenks, ney fingerings, location of holes on neys with various lengths and the corresponding pitch frequencies produced.

³For example for fretted instruments there is a lack of standards and defining appropriate fret locations is an open topic of research. It is observed that the number of frets and their locations vary regionally or due to personal choice.

⁴It should be noted that some names are used both for makams and notes(“perde”s), like: Hicaz, Buselik, Kürdi, Segah, Mahur, etc. For discriminating the two, maqam names are written with the first letter being capital.

⁵ http://www.musiki.org/icra_analizi.htm