Towards Computer-Assisted Flamenco Transcription: An Experimental Comparison of Automatic Transcription Algorithms as Applied to A Cappella Singing

This paper deals with automatic transcription of flamenco music recordings, more specifically a cappella singing. We first study the specificities of flamenco singing and propose a transcription system based on fundamental frequency and energy estimation, which incorporates an iterative strategy for note segmentation and labelling. The proposed approach is evaluated on a music collection of 72 performances, including a variety of singers, recording conditions, presence of percussion, background voices and noise. We obtain satisfying results for the different tested approaches and our system outperforms a state-of-the-art approach designed for other singing styles. In this study, we discuss the difficulties found in transcribing flamenco singing and in evaluating the obtained transcriptions, we analyze the influence of the different steps of the algorithm, and we state the main limitations of our approach and discuss the challenges for future studies. Introduction This section presents the motivation, scientific background and the main goals of this study.