Exploring the Music of Two Masters of the Turkmen Dutar Through Timing Analysis
Dave Fossum, André Holzapfel · 2014
In this paper, we analyze onset characteristics to try to identify important differences between two famous Turkmen dutar per-formers in terms of patterns of timing. We first analyzed an-notated onset data for equivalent excerpts from recordings by these two musicians. We then analyzed unannotated onset data for a larger set of entire recordings. These analyses showed sev-eral conclusions. First, during introductory strumming outside the context of a composed melody, the two have different timing habits. Mylly aga is more consistent and Pürli aga more varied in terms of recurring inter-onset-intervals (IOIs). Second, dur-ing through-composed melodies, the timing profiles of the two musicians are very similar. This perhaps reflects the traditional Turkmen emphasis on preserving the form of traditional compo-sitions in great detail and the attention paid to strumming tech-nique. Finally, we found that automatically derived representa-tions of rhythmic patterns, referred to as pulsation matrices, could be useful for identifying departures from typical timing patterns, which we could then analyze in order to understand such varia-tions and their possible significance. 1.