Towards Alignment of Score and Audio Recordings of Ottoman-turkish Makam Music

Audio-score alignment is a multi-modal task, which facilitates many related tasks such as intonation analysis, structure analysis and automatic accompaniment. In this paper, we present a audio-score alignment methodology for the classical Ottoman-Turkish music tradition. Given a music score of a composition with structure (section) information and an audio performance of the same composition, our method first extracts a synthetic prominent pitch per section from the note values and durations in the score and a audio prominent pitch from the audio recording. Then it identifies the performed tonic frequency by using melodic information in the repetitive section in the score. Next it links each section with the time intervals where each section performed in the audio recording (i.e. structure level alignment) by comparing the extracted pitch features. Finally the score and the audio recordings are aligned in the note-level. For the initial experiments we chose DTW, a standard technique used in audio-score alignment, to show how well the state-of-the-art performs in makam musics. The results show that our method is able to handle the tonic transpositions and the structural differences with ease, however improvements, which address the characteristics of the music scores and the performances of makam musics, are needed in our note-level alignment methodology. To the best knowledge this paper presents the first audio-score alignment method proposed for makam musics.