Our paper on melodic similarity is finally online! The paper is titled
Melodic Contour and Mid-Level Global Features Applied to the Analysis of Flamenco Cantes
This work focuses on the topic of melodic characterization and similarity in a specific musical repertoire: a cappella flamenco singing, more specifically in debla and martinete styles. We propose the combination of manual and automatic description. First, we use a state-of-the-art automatic transcription method to account for general melodic similarity from music recordings. Second, we define a specific set of representative mid-level melodic features, which are manually labelled by flamenco experts. Both approaches are then contrasted and combined into a global similarity measure. This similarity measure is assessed by inspecting the clusters obtained through phylogenetic algorithms and by relating similarity to categorization in terms of style. Finally, we discuss the advantage of combining automatic and expert annotations as well as the need to include repertoire-specific descriptions for meaningful melodic characterization in traditional music collections.
This is the result of a joint work of the COFLA group, where I am contributing with tecnologies for the automatic transcription and melody description of music recordings.
This is an example on how we compare flamenco tonás using melodic similarity and phylogenetic trees:
And this is a video example of the type of styles we analyze in this paper, done by Nadine Kroher based on her work at the MTG:
You can read the full paper online:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09298215.2016.1174717
Emilia Gómez: personal website 