Computational Analysis of Arab-Andalusian Music Through Symbolic Pattern Discovery Algorithms

Arab-Andalusian music was originated in the medieval Islamic territories of the Iberian Peninsula, mixing local traditions and Arabic influences. The expert performer and researcher of the Moroccan tradition of this music, Amin Chaachoo, has developed a theory which supports that Centonization, a melodic composition tech-nique used in Gregorian chant, was also utilized for the creation of this repertoire.

In this thesis, by applying symbolic pattern discovery algorithms to a music score corpus of Arab-Andalusian music of the Moroccan tradition, we aim to contribute to the development of Amin Chaachoo’s theory. For this purpose, relevant patterns are discovered from the transcriptions and compared with the list of musical motives proposed by the expert. As last, results are evaluated using automatic and manual methods, finally, a visualization tool is designed and presented in order to be able to show, listen and compare the patterns in an easy way for the Arab-Andalusian researchers.