International Audio Laboratories Erlangen

Fundamental Frequency Annotations for Georgian Chant Recordings

The recordings used in this study are performed by Artem Erkomaishvili and are publicly available. Further details on the annotation process can be found in [1]. This is a collaboration between the research groups headed by Meinard Müller (AudioLabs, FAU) and Frank Scherbaum (Universität Potsdam).

Background

Georgia has a long and rich music history. In particular, Georgian polyphonic singing has been acknowledged as an intangible cultural heritage. In this context, a collection of music recordings performed by Artem Erkomaishvili (1887–1967)—one of the last representative of the master chanters ("sruligalobelni") of Georgian music—has become of great importance. Recorded at the Tbilisi State Conservatory in 1966, the aging Erkomaishvili was asked to perform three-voice chants by successively singing the individual voices. After recording the lead voice, one tape recorder was used to playback this first voice while a second tape recorder was used to synchronously record the middle voice. Similarly, playing back the first and second voice, the bass voice was recorded. In this way, Erkomaishvil was able to accompany and embellish his own recordings, yielding a genuine source of original Georgian musical thinking. The resulting collection of 101 audio recordings, which comprises various types of chants including hymns for Easter, Christmas, or wedding ceremonies, are of great importance for ethnomusicological research [2].

For each of these 101 recordings, we have manually determined the segments of the three-stage recording process. Furthermore, using an interactive graphical user interface, we estimated the fundamental frequency (F0) trajectory (see [4]) of the lead voice within the first segment, the F0-trajectory of the middle voice within the second segment, and the F0 trajectory bass voice within the third segment. This website provides the segment annotations as well as thee F0 annotations for each of the songs in a simple CSV format. Furthermore, visualizations and sonifications of the F0 trajectories are provided. The technical description of the annotations as well as the techniques and the interface used to estimate these annotations are described in [1].

Furthermore, we indicated the potential of the annotations for musicological research. To this end, we superimposed the estimated F0-trajectories of the lead, middle, and bass voice. Then, for each time position, the intervals (given in cents) between the F0-trajectories of the lead and middle voice, the lead and bass voice, as well as the middle and bass voice were computed. Finally, integrating the occurrences of the different intervals over time, we obtained for each of the three cases an interval distribution, see [3] and [1]. These interval distributions are also show for each of the 101 songs. In the figure, the interval distribution averaged over all 101 recordings is shown.

We hope that our annotations yield a starting point for further ethnomusicological studies within Georgian music research and beyond.

Literature

This is the accompanying website to the paper [1], where further details on the dataset, the annotation process, and the applications are discussed.

1. Meinard Müller, Sebastian Rosenzweig, Jonathan Driedger, and Frank Scherbaum
   Interactive Fundamental Frequency Estimation with Applications to Ethnomusicological Research
   In Submitted to the AES Conference on Semantic Audio, 2017. Bibtex

   @inproceedings{MuellerRDS17_Georgian_AES,
   author    = {Meinard M{\"u}ller and Sebastian Rosenzweig and Jonathan Driedger and Frank Scherbaum},
   title     = {Interactive Fundamental Frequency Estimation with Applications to Ethnomusicological Research},
   booktitle = {Submitted to the {AES} Conference on Semantic Audio},
   address   = {Erlangen, Germany},
   year      = {2017}
   }

2. David Shugliashvili
   Georgian Church Hymns
   Georgian Chanting Foundation, Tibilisi State Conservatiore, ISBN: 979-0-802100-71-8, 2014. Bibtex

   @book{Shugliashvili14_ChurchHymns_Tibilisi,
   author    = {David Shugliashvili},
   title     = {Georgian Church Hymns},
   year      = {2014},
   isbn      = {979-0-802100-71-8},
   publisher = {Georgian Chanting Foundation, Tibilisi State Conservatiore}
   }

3. Frank Scherbaum
   On the benefit of Larynx-microphone field recordings for the documentation and analysis of polyphonic vocal music
   In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Folk Music Analysis: 80–87, 2016. Bibtex PDF Details

   @InProceedings{Scherbaum16_Larynx_WFMA,
   title={On the benefit of Larynx-microphone field recordings for the documentation and analysis of polyphonic vocal music},
   author={Frank Scherbaum},
   booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Workshop on Folk Music Analysis},
   address = {Dublin, Ireland},
   year={2016},
   pages={80--87},
   url-pdf={2016_Scherbaum_LyrfanxMic_FMA.pdf},
   url-details={http://arrow.dit.ie/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1010&context=fema}
   }

4. Meinard Müller
   Fundamentals of Music Processing — Audio, Analysis, Algorithms, Applications
   Springer Verlag, ISBN: 978-3-319-21944-8, 2015. Bibtex Details

   @book{Mueller15_FundamentalsMusicProcessig_SPRINGER,
   author    = {Meinard M\"{u}ller},
   title     = {Fundamentals of Music Processing -- Audio, Analysis, Algorithms, Applications},
   type      = {Monograph},
   year      = {2015},
   isbn      = {978-3-319-21944-8},
   publisher = {Springer Verlag},
   url-details={http://www.music-processing.de}
   }

5. Frank Scherbaum, Meinard Müller, and Sebastian Rosenzweig
   Analysis of the Tbilisi State Conservatory Recordings of Artem Erkomaishvili in 1966
   In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Folk Music Analysis, 2017. Bibtex PDF

   @inproceedings{ScherbaumMR17_Erkomaishvili_FMA,
   author    = {Frank Scherbaum and Meinard M{\"u}ller and Sebastian Rosenzweig},
   title     = {Analysis of the Tbilisi State Conservatory Recordings of Artem Erkomaishvili in 1966},
   booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Workshop on Folk Music Analysis},
   address = {M{\'a}laga, Spain},
   year      = {2017},
   url-pdf   = {2017_ScherbaumMR_ErkomaishviliAnalysis_FMA.pdf}
   }

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If you publish results obtained using these annotations, please cite [1].

Songs

In the following table, the identifiers (IDs) and the song titles are specified as in [2]. The collection of the Erkomaishvili audio recordings does not contain recordings for all songs listed in [2].