Tuning Systems of Traditional Georgian Singing Determined from a New Corpus of Field Recordings

Abstract

In this study we examine the tonal organization of the 2016 GVM dataset, a newly-created corpus of high-quality multimedia field recordings of traditional Georgian singing with a focus on Svaneti. For this purpose, we developed a new processing pipeline for the computational analysis of non-western polyphonic music which was subsequently applied to the complete 2016 GVM dataset. To evaluate under what conditions a single tuning system is representative of current Svan performance practice, we examined the stability of the obtained tuning systems from an ensemble-, a song-, and a corpus-related perspective. Furthermore, we compared the resulting Svan tuning systems with the tuning systems obtained for the Erkomaishvili dataset (Rosenzweig et al., 2020) in the study by Scherbaum et al. (2020). In comparison to a 12-TET (12-tone-equal- temperament) system, the Erkomaishvili and the Svan tuning systems are surprisingly similar. Both systems show a strong presence of pure fourths (500 cents) and fifths (700 cents), and ‘neutral’ thirds (peaking around 350 cents) as well as ‘neutral’ sixths. In addition, the sizes of the melodic and the harmonic seconds in both tuning systems differ systematically from each other, with the size of the harmonic second being systematically larger than the melodic one.