An open corpus for the computational research of Arab-Andalusian music

Comunicació presentada a: the 5th International Conference on Digital Libraries for Musicology (DLfM 2018), satèl·lit de l'ISMIR, celebrat el dia 28 de setembre de 2018 a París, França.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 corpusdriven 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.This work was carried out with the support of the Musical Bridges project, funded by RecerCaixa. The Andalusian Corpus was created by the CompMusic project, funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (ERC grant agreement 267583)