Computational Analysis of Overall Melodic Progression for Turkish Makam Music

Abstract:

One of the most essential features of Turkish makam music is the melodic progression. Yet, we lack computational methods to study the melodic progression characteristics of a given piece. In this study, we propose a method to obtain a graphical representation of the melodic progression for a given collection that can be used to analyze seyir characteristics of a given makam. The representation summarizes the change of relative occurrences of pitches with respect to time and can be collected on audio or scores. In this paper, we demonstrate the potential by comparatively analyzing representations obtained for makamlar that use the same scale and differ in melodic progression.