Automatic Transcription of Turkish Makam Music

In this paper we propose an automatic system for transcribing makam music of Turkey. We document the specific traits of this music that deviate from properties that were targeted by transcription tools so far and we compile a dataset of makam recordings along with aligned microtonal ground-truth. An existing multi-pitch detection algorithm is adapted for transcribing music in 20 cent resolution, and the final transcription is centered around the tonic frequency of the recording. Evaluation metrics for transcribing microtonal music are utilized and results show that transcription of Turkish makam music in e.g. an interactive transcription software is feasible using the current state-of-the-art.