Automatic Melodic Transcription of Flamenco Singing
Emília Gómez, Jordi Bonada · 2008
Background in ethnomusicology and music analysis. Melody in flamenco music is characterized by the presence of microtonality, pitch glides (portamenti or smooth transitions), a short pitch range or tessitura (usually limited to a range of a sixth and characterized by the insistence on a note and its contiguous ones), the use of enharmonic scale (having microtonal intervallic differences between enharmonic notes), a Baroque ornamentation (with an expressive function) and the use of a Greek Dorian mode in the most traditional songs (Fernández 2004). Background in computing, mathematics and statistics. State of the art techniques in melodic analysis of audio allow us to obtain different representation levels of a music recording (Gómez et alt. 2003A, Gómez et alt. 2003B). There are different representation levels for melody. Energy (computed for the whole spectrum or in different frequency bands) and fundamental frequency (related to its perceptual correlate pitch) curves are the main low-level melodic features. They represent the instantaneous evolution of intonation and intensity. In a higher structural level, note duration and pitch provide a symbolic representation, which can be the input to higher-level analyses. Finally, deviations of the analyzed recording with respect to the obtained score are related to expressivity. Aims. The goal of this work is to provide a tool for the automatic melodic transcription of flamenco pieces in different representation levels, focusing on monophonic singing excerpts. The tool should help finding a suitable representation level for flamenco performances and be useful for the comparative analysis of singers and styles.