Sebastian Rosenzweig

Audoo Ltd

Musicology meets seismology - and opens up new possibilities for computer-assisted recording and analysis of polyphonic singing. Researchers use throat microphones to study traditional Georgian vocal music, which is included in the UNESCO World Heritage list.

Within the last century, the originally oral transmission of traditional (Georgian) vocal music has changed dramatically. The first mechanical and later electromagnetic field recording capabilities of sound and the associated acoustic reproducibility led to the first immense changes in the transmission mechanisms. The advent of the Internet and tod...

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 focus on Svaneti) which we collected during the summer of 2016. Because of the peculiarities of the performance practice of traditional Svan singing (e.g, exhibiting a cons...

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 focus on Svaneti) which we collected during the summer of 2016. Because of the peculiarities of the performance practice of traditional Svan singing (e.g, exhibiting a cons...

Three-voiced funeral songs from Svaneti in North-West Georgia (also referred to as Zär) are believed to represent one of Georgia’s oldest preserved forms of collective music-making. Throughout a Zär performance, the singers often jointly and intentionally drift upwards in pitch. Furthermore, the singers tend to use pitch slides at the beginning and...

Polyphonic vocal music is an integral part of music cultures around the world. For studying performance aspects and cultural differences, the analysis of recorded audio material has become of increasing importance. This thesis contributes several computational tools for processing, analyzing, and exploring singing voice recordings using methods fro...

While Georgia has a long history of orally transmitted polyphonic singing, there is still an ongoing controversial discussion among ethnomusicologists on the tuning system underlying this type of music. First attempts have been made to analyze tonal properties (e. g., harmonic and melodic intervals) based on fundamental frequency (F0) trajectories....

In this study we examine the tonal organization of a series of recordings of liturgical chants, sung in 1966 by the Georgian master singer Artem Erkomaishvili. This dataset is the oldest corpus of Georgian chants from which the time synchronous F0-trajectories for all three voices have been reliably determined (Müller et al. 2017). It is therefore...

Choral singing is a central part of musical cultures across the world, yet many facets of this widespread form of polyphonic singing are still to be explored. Music information retrieval (MIR) research on choral singing benefits from multitrack recordings of the individual singing voices. However, there exist only few publicly available multitrack...

In this paper we examine the tonal organization of a series of recordings of liturgical chants, sung in 1966 by the Georgian master singer Artem Erkomaishvili. The aim of the study is to understand the melodic and harmonic tuning systems used by this exceptional singer, a subject that has long been the topic of intense and highly controversial disc...

The analysis of recorded audio material using computational methods has received increased attention in ethnomusicological research. We present a curated dataset of traditional Georgian vocal music for computational musicology. The corpus is based on historic tape recordings of three-voice Georgian songs performed by the the former master chanter A...

Unaccompanied vocal music is a central part of Western art music, yet it requires excellent skills for singers to achieve proper intonation. In this paper, we analyze intonation deficiencies by introducing an intonation cost measure that can be computed from choir recordings and may help to assess the singers' intonation quality. With our approach...

Traditional multipart-singing is an essential component of the national identity of Georgia. It has been an active field of ethnomusicological research since more than 100 years, with a whole series of thematically very diverse research questions. Here, we report on the generation of a new research corpus of traditional Georgian vocal music collect...

In this paper we try to obtain information regarding the musical thinking of Artem Erkomaishvili, one of the last master chanters of traditional Georgian chant. For this purpose, we analyse the recently determined F0-trajectories (Müller et al., 2017) for a set of chant recordings from 1966 in which Artem Erkomaish-vili sang all three voices sequen...

In this paper we try to obtain information regarding the musical thinking of Artem Erkomaishvili, one of the last master chanters of traditional Georgian chant. For this purpose, we analyse the recently determined F0-trajectories (Müller et al., 2017) for a set of chant recordings from 1966 in which Artem Erkomaish-vili sang all three voices sequen...

Historische Audioaufnahmen stellen in Fällen von mündlich überlieferten Musiktraditio-nen oft die einzigen Quellen über frühere musikalische Aufführungspraktiken dar. Wenn, wie im Fall der hier betrachteten mehrstimmigen georgischen Vokalmusik, schriftliche musiktheoretische Zeugnisse fehlen, stellt zum Beispiel schon die Rekonstruktion von früher...