Tarsos, a Modular Platform for Precise Pitch Analysis of Western and Non-Western Music

Abstract

This paper presents Tarsos, a modular software platform used to extract and analyse pitch organization in music. With Tarsos pitch estimations are generated from an audio signal and those estimations are processed in order to form musicologically meaningful representations. Tarsos aims to offer a flexible system for pitch analysis through the combination of an interactive user interface, several pitch estimation algorithms, filtering options, immediate auditory feedback and data output modalities for every step. To study the most frequently used pitches, a fine-grained histogram that allows up to 1200 values per octave is constructed. This allows Tarsos to analyse deviations in Western music, or to analyse specific tone scales that differ from the 12 tone equal temperament, common in many non-Western musics. Tarsos has a graphical user interface or can be launched using an api—as a batch script. Therefore, it is fit for both the analysis of individual songs and the analysis of large music corpora. The interface allows several visual representations, and can indicate the scale of the piece under analysis. The extracted scale can be used immediately to tune a midi keyboard that can be played in the discovered scale. These features make Tarsos an interesting tool that can be used for musicological analysis, teaching and even artistic productions.