Danbinaerin Han

Danbinaerin Han, Rafael Caro Repetto, Dasaem Jeong

In this paper, we introduce a computational analysis of the field recording dataset of approximately 700 hours of Korean folk songs, which were recorded around 1980-90s. Because most of the songs were sung by non-expert musicians without accompaniment, the dataset provides several challenges. To address this challenge, we utilized self-supervised learning with convolutional neural network based on pitch contour, then analyzed how the musical concept of tori, a classification system defined by a specific scale, ornamental notes, and an idiomatic melodic contour, is captured by the model. The experimental result shows that our approach can better capture the characteristics of tori compared to traditional pitch histograms. Using our approaches, we have examined how musical discussions proposed in existing academia manifest in the actual field recordings of Korean folk songs.

Danbinaerin Han, Mark Gotham, Dongmin Kim et al.

We introduce a project that revives a piece of 15th-century Korean court music, Chihwapyeong and Chwipunghyeong, composed upon the poem Songs of the Dragon Flying to Heaven. One of the earliest examples of Jeongganbo, a Korean musical notation system, the remaining version only consists of a rudimentary melody. Our research team, commissioned by the National Gugak (Korean Traditional Music) Center, aimed to transform this old melody into a performable arrangement for a six-part ensemble. Using Jeongganbo data acquired through bespoke optical music recognition, we trained a BERT-like masked language model and an encoder-decoder transformer model. We also propose an encoding scheme that strictly follows the structure of Jeongganbo and denotes note durations as positions. The resulting machine-transformed version of Chihwapyeong and Chwipunghyeong were evaluated by experts and performed by the Court Music Orchestra of National Gugak Center. Our work demonstrates that generative models can successfully be applied to traditional music with limited training data if combined with careful design.