A computational exploration of melodic patterns in Arab-Andalusian music

Data de publicació electrònica: 2021-05-12Here we present a computational approach to identifying melodic patterns in a dataset of 145 MusicXML scores with the aim of contributing to centonization theory in the Moroccan tradition of Arab-Andalusian Music – a theory in development by expert performer and researcher of this tradition, Amin Chaachoo. Central to his work is the definition of a set of characteristic patterns, or centos, for each ṭab‘, or melodic mode. We apply three methods: TF-IDF, Maximally General Distinctive Patterns (MGDP) and the Structure Induction Algorithm (SIA) to identify characteristic patterns at the level of ṭab‘. A substantial number of the centos proposed by Chaachoo are identified and new melodic patterns are retrieved. A discussion with Chaachoo about the obtained results promoted the elicitation of other categories of recurrent patterns in the tradition different from the centos, contributing to a deeper musicological knowledge of the tradition.The authors would like to thank Amin Chaachoo for his valuable work in creating and annotating the Arab-Andalusian Music Corpus and especially for his discussion of our results and the contributions to this paper that arose from that. The authors would also like to thank the CompMusic project for making the Arab-Andalusian Music Corpus publicly available, and Antoni Abelló Sanz for his work in manually segmenting the Music Scores Collection. Finally, the authors express gratitude to the reviewers for their well-considered and constructive feedback, crucial to the improving of this work