An automatic pitch analysis method for Turkish maqam music

Automatic pitch analysis of large audio databases is essential for studies on music information retrieval and developing a pitch scale theory for Turkish maqam music. However no such study is available. In this article, we first determine the main obstacle as the alignment of frequency analysis results from multiple files. We then propose a new method to automatically detect the tonic of a recording, align the data, and estimate overall frequency histograms from large databases. We show that such histograms can be successfully used for pitch scale (tuning) studies on the recordings of Tanburi Cemil Bey, an undisputed master of the genre.