Nawba Recognition for Arab-Andalusian Music Using Templates From Music Scores

Abstract:

 The Arab-Andalusian music is performed through nawabat (plural of nawba ), suites of instrumental and vocal pieces ordered according to their metrical pattern in a sequence of increasing tempo. This study presents for the first time in literature a system for automatic recognition of nawba  for audio recordings of the Moroccan tradition of Arab-Andalusian music. The proposed approach relies on template matching applied to pitch distributions computed from audio recordings. The templates have been created using a data-driven approach, utilizing a score collection categorized into nawabat . This methodology has been tested on a dataset of 58 hours of music: a set of 77 recordings in eleven nawab¯at  from the Arab-Andalusian corpus collected within the CompMusic project and stored in Dunya platform. An accuracy of 75% on the nawba  recognition task is reported using Euclidean distance (L2) as distance metric in the template matching.