Turkish Makam Research Articles

Rauf Yekta’s Notes on the 1932 Congress of Arab Music

The participation of the Turkish musicologist Rauf Yekta (1871–1935) in the Cairo Congress of Arab Music in 1932 and his rejection of the proposed 24-tone equal-tempered scale are well-known facts in musicological literature. However, due to the dearth of primary sources, Yekta’s influential role in the discussions remains largely unknown. Recently discovered notes, published in the periodical Mukhādana/Muhadenet following the Congress, provide new insights into Yekta’s musicological approach in general and his position relative to other participants at the Congress. Based on these notes, this article provides the first comprehensive analysis of Yekta’s opinions on the Congress. While Yekta’s stance cannot be fully understood without considering Turkey’s position between the “Arab” and the “Western” world at the time, as a scholar defending the Turkish makam tradition from the musical revolution of the Republic, his views did not align with the official views of Turkish state representatives. Instead, Yekta depicted a dual musical universe and considered himself capable of reconciling these two worlds’ respective qualities, positioning himself as a mediator between them.

Cognitive and cultural dynamics of melodic structure: a study of post-skip reversals in Rast and Nihavent makams

Post skip reversals, where a significant melodic leap is followed by a change, in direction have been recognized in Western Classical music but haven›t been extensively explored in non-Western traditions like Turkish makam music. We investigated the presence of skip reversals in both the Rast and Nihavent makam within SymbTr encompassing 50 and 45 pieces respectively. To compare types of skip reversals in Rast and Nihavent we categorized all melodic intervals based on their median pitch into four types; landing, approaching, departing and crossing. Chi Squared tests were utilized to analyze the significance of direction changes. Our findings reveal that post skip reversals are prevalent in Turkish makam music. In Rast makam 88.62% of crossing leaps resulted in a change of direction. Similarly, for Nihavent makam, 87.38% of crossing leaps exhibited this pattern. These outcomes support the notion that certain cognitive processes associated with reversals may possess traits that align with theories proposing that melodic skips generate a perceptual imbalance necessitating a reversal. Furthermore, cultural practices and stylistic conventions play a role, in influencing the occurrence of skip reversals. For instance, the strong association between crossing leaps and direction changes in Nihavent makam reflects specific stylistic practices within Turkish classical music, such as the emphasis on maintaining a balanced melodic contour. This indicates that while there are aspects to how we perceive music cultural influences play a role in shaping how these processes are expressed. It shows the interplay, between cognitive tendencies and cultural traditions. The findings focus on the complex interplay between universal cognitive processes, cultural practices and physical constraints, which contribute to a wider understanding of melodic organization in different cultures. In future research, the analysis should expand to include a wider range of makams and incorporate qualitative methods for deeper insight into cultural, historical or performance contexts that influence Post-skip reversal.

Hüseyin Sadettin Arel’in Türk makam müziğinde çok seslilik anlayışı: “kemençe beşlemesi” örneği

Hüseyin Sadettin Arel (1880-1955)’in Türk Makam Müziği (TMM) çalgıları için bestelediği ikileme, üçleme, dörtleme1 gibi eserleri ve özellikle organolojik bir düşünce doğrultusunda ele aldığı kemençe beşlemesi projesi, Batıdaki “çok seslilik” ve “çalgılama” anlayışının TMM çalgılarıyla gerçekleştirilebileceğinin ifadesidir. Arel, bu fikri Batı müziğindeki; quartet, quintet gibi yaylı çalgı topluluklarından almıştır. Bir yandan TMM’yi meşrulaştırmak amacı güden Arel, Batı müziğinin ses sistemi üzerine inşa ettiği bir ‘ses’ ve ‘eğitim’ sistemi sunmakta ve aynı öykünmeyi çok sesli çalgısal eserleriyle de vermeye çalışmaktadır. Makam müziği ve çok sesliliği bir arada kullandığı eserlerinde, bestecilere yeni anlayışı sunmayı hedefleyen Arel, yaşadığı dönemin müzik ve kültürel düşüncesini yansıtmaktadır. İki bölüme ayırabileceğimiz çalışmamızın birinci bölümünde, müzik çalgılarının sosyal ve kültürel hayattaki öneminin yanı sıra, ‘kemençe beşlemesi’ projesinin tarihsel kaynaklar doğrultusunda bir özeti verilmiş ve modernleşme anlayışının projeye katkısına kısaca değinilmiştir. Çalışmanın metodolojisi ve sınırlılıkları ortaya konmuş ve kullanılan terimlerin nedenselliği açıklanmıştır. Bu çerçevede beşlemede karşımıza çıkan müzikal terimler, eserin formu, donanım ve anahtar kullanımları gösterilmiştir. Çalışmamızın ikinci bölümünde kemençe beşlemesindeki çalgılar, müzik terimleri, anahtar ve donanım kullanımları ile çok seslilik anlayışı analiz edilmiştir. Ayrıca kemençe beşlemesinde ney çalgısına yer verilmesi, Arel’in Batı müziğini emsal alarak yaptığı proje doğrultusunda, Batı müziği formları üzerinden tartışılmıştır. Arel-Ezgi-Uzdilek (AEU) sisteminde bir sekizli içinde 24 perde olması ve aralıkların eşit olmaması sebebiyle, eserin armonik analizinde karşımıza çıkan akor tipleri tespit edilmiş ve analizler bu yöntem doğrultusunda tonal armoni analizi kapsamında yapılmıştır. Bu meyanda Arel’in besteciliği ve kemençe beşlemesinin çok seslilik anlayışı incelenmiş ve kendi sistemine uyan ve uymayan yapılar tespit edilerek örneklerle açıklanmıştır. Bu eksende çalışmamız kemençe beşlemesindeki müzikal analizin ilk defa ele alınması açısından önem arz etmektedir.

Temporal Evolution of Makam and Usul Relationship in Turkish Makam

Turkish makam music is transmitted orally and learned through repetition. Most previous computational analysis works focus either on makam (its melodic structure) or usul (its rhythmic pattern) separately. The work presented in this paper performs a combined analysis to explore the descriptive potential of the relationship between these in over 600 makam pieces.

Inside Arabic Music: Arabic Maqam Performance and Theory in the 20th Century

Inside Arabic Music: Arabic Maqam Performance and Theory in the 20th Century

A Corpus Study on Rhythmic Modes in Turkish Makam Music and Their Interaction with Meter

A Corpus Study on Rhythmic Modes in Turkish Makam Music and Their Interaction with Meter

Sephardic music in Renan Koen’s compositions

This study has been prepared in order to determine that the representatives of Sephardic music living in Istanbul still exist and to examine the extent to which Sephardic music affects the compositions of Renan Koen. Sephardic music has become a very diverse music in itself, extending from North Africa to the Balkans, from Spain to Israel, by interacting in different ways in the historical process. It has been observed that the Sephardic peoples living in Turkey since 1492 were influenced by the Turkish Makam Music, Folk Music, Greek Music, Rembetiko and the religious music of Jewish traditions and customs. Sephardic people were able to carry their own music to the geographies they were in through immigration. The Ottoman Empire was also one of the settlements where the Sephardic took refuge and had a musical memory that lasted for more than five hundred years. It is seen that the most important factor in the transmission of this memory from generation to generation until the twenty-first century is musicians and composers. Renan Koen, one of the composers of our time; she composed many classical and contemporary compositions and took an innovative role in the performances and arrangements of Sephardic music. At the same time, she worked as a transmitter and brought a new style to Sephardic music with the arrangements she made. In the context of Sephardic music, a verbal interview was made with Renan Koen, and her compositions were examined and a conclusion was reached about the original compositions that the artist applied to Sephardic melodies.

Deep learning for Turkish makam music composition

In this paper, we introduce a new deep-learning-based system that can compose structured Turkish makam music (TMM) in the symbolic domain. Presented artificial TMM composer (ATMMC) takes eight initial notes from a human user and completes the rest of the piece. The backbone of the composer system consists of multilayered long short-term memory (LSTM) networks. ATMMC can create pieces in Hicaz and Nihavent makams in Şarkı form, which can be viewed and played with Mus2, a notation software for microtonal music. Statistical analysis shows that pieces composed by ATMMC are approximately 84% similar to training data. ATMMC is an open-source project and can assist Turkish makam music enthusiasts with creating new pieces for professional, educational, or entertainment purposes.

Temperament systems influence emotion induction but not makam recognition performance in Turkish makam music

We tested how induced emotions and Turkish makam recognition are influenced by participation in an ear training class and whether either is influenced by the temperament system employed. The ear training class was attended by 19 music students and was based on the Hicaz makam presented as a between-subjects factor in either unfamiliar Turkish original temperament (OT, pitches unequally divided into 24 intervals) or familiar Western equal temperament (ET, pitches equally divided into 12 intervals). Before and after the class, participants listened to 20 music excerpts from five different Turkish makams (in both OT and ET versions). Emotion induction was assessed via the 25-item version of Geneva Emotion Music Scales (GEMS-25), and participants were also asked to identify the makam that was present in the excerpt. The unfamiliar OT was experienced as less vital and more uneasy before the ear training class, and recognition of the Hicaz makam increased after ear training classes (independent of the temperament system employed). Results suggest that unfamiliar temperament systems are experienced as less vital and more uneasy. Furthermore, being exposed to this temperament system for just 1 hr does not seem to be enough to change participants’ mental representations of it or their emotional responses to it.

Classification of Turkish makam music: a topological approach

In this paper, we study Turkish makam music, a system of varied melodies and chords, computationally. Our main goal is to classify the makams using their notes. For this reason, we utilize the topology of complex networks. We first represent songs with weighted networks where vertices and edges correspond to musical notes and their co-occurrences respectively. We then define the diffusion Fréchet function over the weighted networks to encode the network topology and finally reach our goal by combining the function values with machine-learning algorithms. Our experiments show that such network representation with the diffusion Fréchet function is promising in classifying makam music and more effective than the n-gram technique, which is the most-used automated makam classification method. We believe that our method can be extended to any music, not only makam music.

Perceiving Boundaries in Unfamiliar Turkish Makam Music

Music segmentation is a widely researched topic within music perception. Even though there is extensive data on the role of surface structure features and music training (e.g., Deliège, 1987) in segmentation, not much is known yet about the influence of implicit knowledge-based features acquired through musical enculturation. The goal of our study was to fill this gap. Makam music-trained musicians, nonmusicians, and Western listeners marked their segmentations online as they listened to mostly 19th century, unfamiliar Turkish makam tunes, all recorded in a Qānūn timbre on MIDI with retained microtonal structure. In addition, two experts segmented the tunes in a free-time setting. We found considerable within- and across-group agreement, as well as good agreement with the expert segmentations. After transforming each participant’s segmentations into “hits” and “false alarms” based on their match or mismatch with expert segmentations, we observed that musicians overlapped significantly more with expert segmentations than do the other two groups. Segmentations in all three groups were strongly driven by mostly local surface features. Overall, our results are more supportive of a universality claim as proposed by the Gestalt school of psychology than an enculturation claim.

WESTERN HARMONY IN THE PRACTICE AND EDUCATION OF TURKISH MAKAM MUSIC

In this paper, the interaction between Turkish Makam Music and Western Music who is composed from tampered sounds has been discussed and the interaction has been situated in a historical period. This interaction has been evaluated in three domains which are; education; performance and composition. The education on this two musical language has been done detachedly in Ottoman Empire and in Turkey as well and this fact may interrupt the formation of composers who can compose with both languages. As composition process is an individual process this two musical knowledge has to be given to one same person. At the other hand even the education goes detachedly the performers has used the western harmony with makam at the last 40 years. This has been showed with different examples from the albums of artists such as Zeki Muren, Baris Manco, Sezen Aksu, Inci Cayirli. All this examples has showed that this period starts at 1970’s. The multicultural character of this music has been underlined for showing how this music is able to adapt himself to a different culture. After adapting Arabic, Persian and Byzantine music characteristics to himself, this music can and should embrace western music harmony system at the end of 200 years of intense interaction.

An Interactive Rhythm Training Tool for Usuls of Turkish Makam Music

An Interactive Rhythm Training Tool for Usuls of Turkish Makam Music

Experiments on the Relationship between Perde and Seyir in Turkish Makam Music

“When I was a kid, the elders in the village could tell the makam of a piece just by listening.” While interviewing performers, enthusiasts, and experts in traditional Turkish taksims (improvisations), variations of this comment were made many times. Some of the respondents claimed to be able to identify the makam of a taksim, but others believed that this ability might now be a lost art. This paper documents a series of experiments (based on caricaturized or skeletonized taksim-like creations) designed to determine if it is possible to identify the makam from purely acoustical features, and, when possible, to determine the relative importance of the various audible features that may be used to establish the makam. Two basic classes of features are investigated: perde (the set of pitches used in the performance) and seyir (which relates to temporal motion within the piece, for instance, repetitive or common motives or melodic contour). The experiments provide evidence that both kinds of features contribute to the ability to recognize makams. Experiments that randomize the order of events show that pitch cues (perde) are often adequate to allow accurate identification of the makam. In experiments where both pitch and temporal cues are present but conflict (for example, a piece in which the perde is chosen from one makam and the seyir from another), experts often favor the temporal information.

Relation Between Surface Rhythm and Rhythmic Modes in Turkish Makam Music

Sounds in a piece of music form rhythmic patterns on the surface of a music signal, and in a metered piece these patterns stand in some relation to the underlying rhythmic mode or meter. In this paper, we investigate how the surface rhythm is related to the usul, which are the rhythmic modes in compositions of Turkish makam music. On a large corpus of notations of vocal pieces in short usul we observe the ways notes are distributed in relation to the usul. We observe differences in these distributions between Turkish makam and Eurogenetic music, which imply a less accentuated stratification of meter in Turkish makam music. We observe changes in rhythmic style between two composers who represent two different historical periods in Turkish makam music, a result that adds to previous observations on changes in style of Turkish makam music throughout the centuries. We demonstrate that rhythmic aspects in Turkish makam music can be considered as the outcome of a generative model, and conduct style comparisons in a Bayesian statistical framework.

A computational analysis of Turkish makam music based on a probabilistic characterization of segmented phrases

This study targets automatic analysis of Turkish makam music pieces on the phrase level. While makam is most simply defined as an organization of melodic phrases, there has been very little effort to computationally study melodic structure in makam music pieces. In this work, we propose an automatic analysis algorithm that takes as input symbolic data in the form of machine-readable scores that are segmented into phrases. Using a measure of makam membership for phrases, our method outputs for each phrase the most likely makam the phrase comes from. The proposed makam membership definition is based on Bayesian classification and the algorithm is specifically designed to process the data with overlapping classes. The proposed analysis system is trained and tested on a large data set of phrases obtained by transferring phrase boundaries manually written by experts of makam music on printed scores, to machine-readable data. For the task of classifying all phrases, or only the beginning phrases to come from the main makam of the piece, the corresponding F-measures are .52 and .60 respectively.

Usul and Makam driven automatic melodic segmentation for Turkish music

Automatic melodic segmentation is a topic studied extensively, aiming at developing systems that perform grouping of musical events. Here, we consider the problem of automatic segmentation via supervised learning from a dataset containing segmentation labels of an expert. We present a statistical classification-based segmentation system developed specifically for Turkish makam music. The proposed system uses two novel features, a makam-based and an usul-based feature, together with features commonly used in literature. The makam-based feature is defined as the probability of a note to appear at the phrase boundary, computed from the distributions of boundaries with respect to the piece’s makam pitches. Likewise, the usul-based feature is computed from the distributions of boundaries with respect to beats in the rhythmic cycle, usul of the piece. Several experimental setups using different feature groups are designed to test the contribution of the proposed features on three datasets. The results show that the new features carry complementary information to existing features in the literature within the Turkish makam music segmentation context and that the inclusion of new features resulted in statistically significant performance improvement.

A Hierarchical Approach to Makam Classification of Turkish Makam Music, Using Symbolic Data

A Hierarchical Approach to Makam Classification of Turkish Makam Music, Using Symbolic Data

Computational Analysis of Turkish Makam Music: Review of State-of-the-Art and Challenges

This text targets a review of the computational analysis literature for Turkish makam music, discussing in detail the challenges involved and presenting a perspective for further studies. For that purpose, the basic concepts of Turkish makam music and the description of melodic, rhythmic and timbral aspects are considered in detail. Studies on tuning analysis, automatic transcription, automatic melodic analysis, automatic makam and usul detection are reviewed. Technological and data resource needs for further advancement are discussed and available sources are presented.

A Hierarchical Approach to Makam Classification of Turkish Makam Music, Using Symbolic Data

A method for hierarchical classification of makams from symbolic data is presented. A makam generally implies a miscellany of rules for melodic composition using a given scale. Therefore, makam detection is to some level similar to the key detection problem. The proposed algorithm classifies makams by applying music theoretical knowledge and statistical evidence in a hierarchical manner. The makams using similar scales are first grouped together, and then identified in detail later. The first level of the hierarchical decision is based on statistical information provided by the n-gram likelihood of the symbolic sequences. A cross-entropy based metric, perplexity, is used to calculate similarity between makam models and the input music piece. Later, using statistical features related to the content of the piece, such as the tonic note, the average pitch level for local excerpts and the overall pitch progression, a more detailed identification of the makam is achieved. Different length n-grams and representation paradigms are used, including the Arel theory, the 12 tone equal tempered representation, and interval contour. Results show that the hierarchical approach is better, compared to a straightforward n-gram classification, for the makams which have similar pitch space, such as Hüseyni–Muhayyerand Rast–Mahur. Using the proposed methodology, the system’s recall rate increases from 88.7% to 90.9% where there exists still some confusion between the makams Uşşak and Beyati.