FMA 2017 Tutorial

FMA 2017 will feature a tutorial on Thursday morning.

Tutorial. The Persian musical system and the dastgàh recognition

Peyman Heydarian, London Metropolitan University

OUTLINE OF THE TUTORIAL

A tutorial on Persian music analysis, covering the intervals; the dastgàh (the underlying system of Persian music); forms and composition; and the MIR methods for Persian dastgàh recognition. The dastgàh, the underlying modal system of Iranian classical music, is a phenomenon similar to maqàm in Turkish and Arabic music. It usually represents the scale and tonic, and is to some extent an indication of the mood of a piece. Methods for computational identification of the tonic and scale in Persian audio musical signals will be presented. The feature sets, chroma (a simplified spectrum) and pitch histograms; the classifiers, Manhattan distance, dot-product, and bit-mask; and theoretical and data-driven templates will be presented and compared. Theoretical templates are constructed, either using the scale intervals or by making a note histogram of existing pieces. Data-driven templates are made by calculation of the chroma of available audio samples. You can download THIS PDF FILE for further information.

Peyman Heydarian, born in Shiraz, Iran is an award-winning music scientist and santur virtuoso. Peyman started learning Persian music under the supervision of music masters, including Mojtaba Mirzadeh and Pashang Kamkar. His main instrument is the santur. He also plays the daf, piano, tar, violin, bouzouki, baqlama and harmonica. He has developed his own performance style on the santur and has adapted innovative tuning systems and techniques to play a multi-ethnic repertoire on the instrument. Peyman has taught music and signal processing courses at different universities and has established and presided over a number of musical societies and bands, including the Music Association of Iranian Students (1998) and the National Iranian Students Orchestra (1999-2004). Since 1982, he has performed in Iran, USA, Canada, Syria, Jordan, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Hong Kong and the UK. Peyman has been composing and recording music for films, including a BBC TV4 project “Axis of Light” and an Aljazeera TV film “Lover Boys”. Peyman has been working in the field of music DSP since 1998. He holds BSc and MSc degrees in Electronic Engineering, from Shiraz University (1997) and Tarbiat Modarres University (2000) in Iran. And completed his MPhil on Signal processing at the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary, University of London (2008). Subsequently, he studied ethnomusicology at SOAS, University of London for a year (2010) and studied his PhD at London Metropolitan University (2016). He is currently researching the possibilities of pushing the boundaries of the Persian music and santur performance; also developing algorithms for automatic recognition of the dastgàh / maqàm in audio musical signals.