SECTION-LEVEL MODELING OF MUSICAL AUDIO FOR LINKING PERFORMANCES TO SCORES IN TURKISH MAKAMMUSIC

Section linking is an important task that is closely related to audio-to-score alignment, where the aim is to relate certain impor-tant structural boundaries in a reference score of a piece to their oc-currences in the recording of the piece. The problem becomes more challenging when the performances differ substantially from the ref-erence score due to interpretation and improvisation, which is very common in non-western musics such as the Turkish makam music. In this paper, we address the section linking task and present a score-informed hierarchical Hidden Markov Model for modeling musical audio signals from a coarser temporal level, where the main idea is to explicitly model the long range and hierarchical structure of mu-sic signals. In addition to having low computational complexity and achieving a transparent and elegant model, the experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art on a Turkish makam music corpus. Index Terms — Audio-to-score alignment, Section linking, Hi-erarchical hidden Markov models, Turkish makam musi