Emilia Gómez and Francisco Gómez are presently collaborating with CIRMMT members, Catherine Guastavino, Godfried Toussaint and Fabrice Marandola, awardees of the CIRMMT Strategic Innovation Fund (2007-2008), on a project on flamenco music.
ABSTRACTS:
Emilia Gómez
Music Technology Group, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain
Music Analysis, Similarity and Classification based on Chroma Features: Examples of the Study of Flamenco Music
Chroma features are widely used in the Music Information Retrieval field for a wide range of applications. They are computed from audio recordings and they represent the pitch class distribution of a musical piece. Most of the work until now has focused on the analysis of music from the Western tradition, but we might ask if the available methods are suitable when analyzing music from other cultures. I will present some of my work on this field, focusing on the use of chroma features for harmonic and tonal analysis of polyphonic audio and music similarity (cover version identification). I will also put forward some research on the comparative analysis of music from different parts of the world by means of chroma feature extraction and data mining techniques. I will illustrate the talk with some excerpts of flamenco music, characterized by the presence of microtonality and a high degree of ornamentation.
Francisco Gómez
Applied Mathematics Department, Polytecnic University of Madrid, Spain
Comparative Melodic Analysis of a Cappella Flamenco Singing Styles
A cappella singing styles (called "cantes" in the flamenco jargon) are among the most fundamental song styles within the flamenco repertoire. An interesting problem in flamenco is how to quantify the similarity between two given melodies. A measure of similarity for flamenco melody could be useful to discriminate different styles and performers. In this work we compared different approaches used in melodic and tonal analysis of flamenco a capella singing styles. We carried out a multidisciplinary analysis that included historical knowledge and melodic and tonal analysis. This analysis were manually carried out by flamenco experts and then repeated by using automatic melodic description tools. We began by gathering a representative musical corpus. This corpus is composed of two main styles, namely: martinetes and tonas. As a second step, we performed different analysis of this music collection. Critical issues arose regarding the location of the main notes of the melody, the idiosyncratic use of vibrato and the presence of non-equal-tempered intervals. Some similarity measures between each pair of pieces have been computed, such as the edit distance. We compared the results obtained with automatic tools with the results produced by flamenco experts.