Relation Between Surface Rhythm and Rhythmic Modes in Turkish Makam Music

Abstract

Sounds in a piece of music form rhythmic patterns on the surface of a music signal, and in a metered piece these patterns stand in some relation to the underlying rhythmic mode or meter. In this paper, we investigate how the surface rhythm is related to the usul, which are the rhythmic modes in compositions of Turkish makam music. On a large corpus of notations of vocal pieces in short usul we observe the ways notes are distributed in relation to the usul. We observe differences in these distributions between Turkish makam and Eurogenetic music, which imply a less accentuated stratification of meter in Turkish makam music. We observe changes in rhythmic style between two composers who represent two different historical periods in Turkish makam music, a result that adds to previous observations on changes in style of Turkish makam music throughout the centuries. We demonstrate that rhythmic aspects in Turkish makam music can be considered as the outcome of a generative model, and conduct style comparisons in a Bayesian statistical framework.

Keywords:

• makam music
• musical meter
• rhythm analysis
• style change
• Turkish music

Notes

1 We introduce this term because we want to avoid the misleading dichotomy of Western and non-Western music. We use the word ‘genetic’ rather with its connotation as ‘pertaining to origins’, coined in 1831 by Carlyle from the Greek genetikos ‘genitive’, from genesis ‘origin’, and not in its biological sense as first applied by Darwin in 1859 (http://www.etymonline.com). The term was proposed by Prof. Robert Reigle (MIAM, Istanbul) in a personal communication.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship [grant number 328379] within the 7th European Community Framework Programme. The initial phase of data collection was supported by the European Research Council under the 7th European Community Framework Programme, as part of the CompMusic project [grant number 267583].