An Approach for Linking Score and Audio Recordings in Makam Music of Turkey

The main information sources to study a particular piece of music are symbolic scores and audio recordings. These are complementary representations of the piece and it is very useful to have a proper linking between the two of the musically meaningful events. For the case of makam music of Turkey, linking the available scores with the corresponding audio recordings requires taking the specificities of this music into account, such as the particular tunings, the extensive usage of non-notated expressive elements, and the way in which the performer repeats fragments of the score. Moreover, for most of the pieces of the classical repertoire, there is no score written by the original composer. In this paper, we propose a methodology to pair sections of a score to the corresponding fragments of audio recording performances. The pitch information obtained from both sources is used as the common representation to be paired. From an audio recording, fundamental frequency estimation and tuning analysis is done to compute a pitch contour. From the corresponding score, symbolic note names and durations are converted to a synthetic pitch contour. Then, a linking operation is performed between these pitch contours in order to find the best correspondences. The method is tested on a dataset of 11 compositions spanning 44 audio recordings, which are mostly monophonic. An F3-score of 82% and 89% are obtained with automatic and semi-automatic karar detection respectively, showing that the methodology may give us a needed tool for further computational tasks such as form analysis, audio-score alignment and makam recognition.