Pitch-frequency histogram-based music information retrieval for Turkish music

This study reviews the use of pitch histograms in music information retrieval studies for western and non-western music. The problems in applying the pitch-class histogram-based methods developed for western music to non-western music and specifically to Turkish music are discussed in detail. The main problems are the assumptions used to reduce the dimension of the pitch histogram space, such as, mapping to a low and fixed dimensional pitch-class space, the hard-coded use of western music theory, the use of the standard diapason (A4 = 440 Hz), analysis based on tonality and tempered tuning. We argue that it is more appropriate to use higher dimensional pitch-frequency histograms without such assumptions for Turkish music. We show in two applications, automatic tonic detection and makam recognition, that high dimensional pitch-frequency histogram representations can be successfully used in Music Information Retrieval (MIR) applications without such pre-assumptions, using the data-driven models. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.