Tarsos – a Platform to Explore Pitch Scales in Non-Western and Western Music

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Publication type: Articles in peer reviewed conference proceedings

Abstract: This paper presents Tarsos, a modular software platform to extract and analyze pitch and scale organization in music, especially geared towards the analysis of non-Western music. Tarsos aims to be a user-friendly, graphical tool to explore tone scales and pitch organization in music of the world. With Tarsos pitch annotations are extracted from an audio signal that are then processed to form musicologically meaningful representations. These representations cover more than the typical Western 12 pitch classes, since a fine-grained resolution of 1200 cents is used. Both scales with and without octave equivalence can be displayed graphically. The Tarsos API creates opportunities to analyse large sets of - ethnic - music automatically. The graphical user interface can be used for detailed, manually adjusted analysis of specific songs. Several output modalities make Tarsos an interesting tool for musicological analysis, educational purposes and even for artistic productions.

@inproceedings{six2011tarsos,
	Author = {Joren Six and Olmo Cornelis},
	Booktitle = {Proceedings of the 12th {I}nternational {S}ymposium on 
                     {M}usic {I}nformation {R}etrieval ({ISMIR} 2011)},
	Title = {{T}arsos - a {P}latform to {E}xplore {P}itch {S}cales 
                 in {N}on-{W}estern and {W}estern {M}usic},
	Year = {2011}
}