Francisco Gómez

Aitor Arronte Alvarez, Francisco Gomez-Martin

Flamenco singing is characterized by pitch instability, micro-tonal ornamentations, large vibrato ranges, and a high degree of melodic variability. These musical features make the automatic identification of flamenco singers a difficult computational task. In this article we present an end-to-end pipeline for flamenco singer identification based on acoustic motif embeddings. In the approach taken, the fundamental frequency obtained directly from the raw audio signal is approximated. This approximation reduces the high variability of the audio signal and allows for small melodic patterns to be discovered using a sequential pattern mining technique, thus creating a dictionary of motifs. Several acoustic features are then used to extract fixed length embeddings of variable length motifs by using convolutional architectures. We test the quality of the embeddings in a flamenco singer identification task, comparing our approach with previous deep learning architectures, and study the effect of motivic patterns and acoustic features in the identification task. Results indicate that motivic patterns play a crucial role in identifying flamenco singers by minimizing the size of the signal to be learned, discarding information that is not relevant in the identification task. The deep learning architecture presented outperforms denser models used in large-scale audio classification problems.

Aitor Arronte-Alvarez, Francisco Gomez-Martin

In this paper we present an attentional neural network for folk song classification. We introduce the concept of musical motif embedding, and show how using melodic local context we are able to model monophonic folk song motifs using the skipgram version of the word2vec algorithm. We use the motif embeddings to represent folk songs from Germany, China, and Sweden, and classify them using an attentional neural network that is able to discern relevant motifs in a song. The results show how the network obtains state of the art accuracy in a completely unsupervised manner, and how motif embeddings produce high quality motif representations from folk songs. We conjecture on the advantages of this type of representation in large symbolic music corpora, and how it can be helpful in the musicological analysis of folk song collections from different cultures and geographical areas.

Aitor Arronte-Alvarez, Francisco Gómez-Martin

This article presents a distributed vector representation model for learning folksong motifs. A skip-gram version of word2vec with negative sampling is used to represent high quality embeddings. Motifs from the Essen Folksong collection are compared based on their cosine similarity. A new evaluation method for testing the quality of the embeddings based on a melodic similarity task is presented to show how the vector space can represent complex contextual features, and how it can be utilized for the study of folksong variation.

Francisco Gómez, Joaquín Mora, Emilia Gómez et al.

This work focuses on the topic of melodic characterization and similarity in a specific musical repertoire: a cappella flamenco singing, more specifically in debla and martinete styles. We propose the combination of manual and automatic description. First, we use a state-of-the-art automatic transcription method to account for general melodic similarity from music recordings. Second, we define a specific set of representative mid-level melodic features, which are manually labeled by flamenco experts. Both approaches are then contrasted and combined into a global similarity measure. This similarity measure is assessed by inspecting the clusters obtained through phylogenetic algorithms algorithms and by relating similarity to categorization in terms of style. Finally, we discuss the advantage of combining automatic and expert annotations as well as the need to include repertoire-specific descriptions for meaningful melodic characterization in traditional music collections.