Classification of Turkish Makam Music: a Topological Approach

Abstract

In this project 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 sake, we utilize the topology of complex networks. We first represent songs with weighted networks where nodes and edges correspond to musical notes and their co-occurrences respectively. We then define the diffusion Frechet 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 Frechet function is promising in classifying makam music. We believe that our method can be extended to any music, not only makam music.