Rafael Caro Repetto

Automatic Alignment of Long Syllables in a Cappella Beijing Opera

Comunicacio presentada al 6th International Workshop on Folk Music Analysis, celebrat els dies 15 a 17 de juny de 2016 a Dublin, Irlanda.

An Open Corpus for the Computational Research of Arab-Andalusian Music

In the medieval Islamic territories of the Iberian Peninsula known as Al-Andalus a unique style of music was formed combining local practices with Arab sensibilities. After the fall of the last Andalusian kingdom, this classical repertoire has been preserved to the present in North African countries. The idiosyncrasies of this repertoire, which combines musical traits from Western and Eastern Mediterranean traditions in orchestral and choral settings, as well as instrumental and vocal solos, deserves an in depth musicological study, that can benefit from computational tools for corpus-driven research. On the other hand, the characteristics of this music poses interesting challenges to MIR methods and therefore offer new research opportunities to this field. To address these topics, we present here the first complete release of the corpus for the research of the Moroccan tradition of Arab-Andalusian music built in the framework of the CompMusic project. The corpus comprises three data collections, namely audio recordings, music scores and lyrics, as well as related annotations and metadata. We also present a series of Jupyter Notebooks for browsing and retrieving data from the corpus. Both the corpus and notebooks are completely open to the research community.

Quantitative analysis of the relationship between linguistic tones and melody in jingju using music scores

When lyrics of tonal languages are set to music, the pitch contour of the tones has to agree to a certain extent with the melodic contour to assure intelligibility. The relationship between the linguistic tones of the complex dialectal construct used in jingju (commonly known as Beijing or Peking opera) and its melody has been largely studied, but not definite consensus has been achieved among scholars. After reviewing the related literature, we present a first approach for the quantitative analysis of the relationship between linguistic tones and melody in jingju using a collection of machine readable music scores with tone category annotations for 7,283 syllables. We describe two statistical analyses performed in this collection regarding the melodic contour for each syllable and the pitch height relationship in 5,494 pairs of consecutive syllables. We argue that the obtained results contribute to supporting claims from the literature and complementing others, although some limitations of the approach might nuance the confidence of their validity.

Creating an A Cappella Singing Audio Dataset for Automatic Jingju Singing Evaluation Research

The data-driven computational research on automatic jingju (also known as Beijing or Peking opera) singing evaluation lacks a suitable and comprehensive a cappella singing audio dataset. In this work, we present an a cappella singing audio dataset which consists of 120 arias, accounting for 1265 melodic lines. This dataset is also an extension our existing CompMusic jingju corpus. Both professional and amateur singers were invited to the dataset recording sessions, and the most common jingju musical elements have been covered. This dataset is also accompanied by metadata per aria and melodic line annotated for automatic singing evaluation research purpose. All the gathered data is openly available online1.