THE USABILITY OF SOUND PROCESSING TOOLS ON MUSICAL HEARING EVALUATION EXAMS

Program Code: 1001
Project No: 215K017
Project Coordinator: Doç. Dr. Ozan BAYSAL
Researcher: Doç. Dr. Barış BOZKURT
Advisors: Prof. Dr. Nilgün DOĞRUSÖZ DİŞİAÇIK, Prof. Dr. Turan SAĞER
Scholarship Holders: Burçin Bahadır GÜNER, Oğul KÖKER

Abstract: In Turkey, the acceptance to the music conservatories – both in high school and undergraduate levels – is determined according to the entrance exams that are designed to measure the musical aptitude of the candidates. Held on a limited time with numerous applicants, these jury-based exams bear many difficulties as they require the evaluation of each candidate separately. In many institutions the exams are executed in two phases, the first phase usually being a qualification exam of musical hearing. Initiated in 2016 with the support of Tubitak 1001 program, our project (#215K017) investigated the effective potentiality of using sound engineering tools - for automatic assessment of recorded sounds - in the musical hearing portion of the musical aptitude exams. For this, the recorded exam performances of the candidates and the jury evaluations of these performances (jury reports) were collected at the outset and an extensive database of “success” and “fail” samples has been created. Following this the recorded samples were analized and comparisions were made with the paired jury evaluations using sound and computer engineering tools. In addition to such analyses, a computer-based survey was devised among voluntary faculty members who had the eligibility to become a juror, and the acceptable frequency and interval deviation ranges for single pitch and interval questions were found. With all these information, it was observed that the designed tool gives successful results for the pitch-related exam questions (repetitions of single pitch, interval and triads) if the candidate’s performance is recorded clearly. On the other hand the designed automatic melody and rhythm assessment tools work with an accuracy of %86 and %81. These scores can be improved by collecting new data from raters that are isolated from each other - and the exam environment -, as the data we relied on seems to be not totally unbiased.

WORD PAINTING IN MEVLEVI MUSIC

Program Code: 1001
Project No: 117K383
Project Coordinator: Doç. Dr. Ozan BAYSAL
Advisors: Prof. Dr. Nilgün DOĞRUSÖZ DİŞİAÇIK, Prof. Dr. Gözde ÇOLAKOĞLU SARI
Scholarship Holders:Elif ÖZEN, Salih DEMİRTAŞ

Abstract: This project, supported by TUBİTAK (Grant no:117K383), investigated the integrity of the lyrics and music in the Mevlevi Ayin repertoire, one of the most artistic and most serious genres in Turkish Music. Although the relationship of music with lyrics and the discussions on the reflection of the verbal meaning in music go back as far back as the Antiquity, the compositional technique that first describes such a use, that is the deliberate shaping of music by the composer in order to reflect the meaning of the poetry, in the history of music was during XV. Century Europe. The device was coined as “word-paiting”. It is seen that this technique, which is used in the vocal genres such as madrigal in the beginning, also found its place in the opera genre in later periods and by gradually penetrating into the instrumental genre as well, contributed to the development of program music genre of XIX.century Europe. The present project is aimed at investigating the use of a similar technique by composers consciously or semi-consciously in the context of Mevlevi Ayin, which has a programmatic structure in its essence and with lyrics having many literary and symbolic meanings. Although researches on the relation between word and music have been studied in our country, it has an important place especially in the field of music analysis, music aesthetics and musical semiotics in today's musicology literature. The aim of this project is to investigate such instances in the selected works of the Mevlevi Ayin repertoire, and to reveal the composition techniques developed by composers and to determine the place and the transformation of such techniques in the tradition. A similar study was not found in the national and international literature . A total of 53 Mevlevi Ayins were analized in total, 11 of which were investigated from different notational editions. It is revealed that such a lyrical meaning had important reflections in musical structure as well. The main categories drawn from our investigations are (1) Changes in Çeşni/Makam structure, (2) Changes in the shape and direction of the melodic flow, (3) employment of some musical intervals to underline some specific words, (4) changes in phrase rhythm and time, and (5) other techniques such as the relationships between the musical and extramusical found in written sources and their usage in music.

DESCRIPTIVE AND SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS OF POPULAR MUSIC PRODUCTION IN TURKEY BETWEEN THE YEARS 2007-2017

Project No: 215K165
Project Coordinator: Prof. Songül KARAHASANOĞLU
Project Researcher: Doç. Dr. Elif Damla YAVUZ
Advisor: Prof. Dr. Gözde ÇOLAKOĞLU SARI
Scholarship Holders: Onur KARABİBER, Kader TÜNGÜÇ, Güncel Gürsel ARTIKTAY
Former Researcher: Nihan TAHTAİŞLEYEN

Abstract: Whether popular music is considered as the production of “ordinary people” or as the production of masses (Storey, 2003) it contains series of meanings and narratives telling the social and economic structure of the society in which it is produced and consumed. The major axis in analyzing these meanings and narratives is to follow Theodor W. Adorno (1944) and the Frankfurt School, Antonio Gramsci (1971), Simon Firth (1978), Stuart Hall (1980), Richard Hoggart (1957) and the Birmingham School and to consider popular music as an arena in which hegemonic relations become visible. Therefore, researchers often focus on these relations and how the popular music industry operates. Musicology, on the other hand, participates in these studies with their basic tool, musical analysis. However, the first thing at this point to be thought is that what kind of musical analysis should be used, because starting from the parameters, which were basically developed to analyze Western musical tradition, determining makam, scale, usûl and formal structure for example, comes up short in order to understand the popular music production as it has been defined above that has close ties with the social structure in which it is produced and consumed. That is also the reason why some musicologists and ethnomusicologists have criticized this convention for objectivism (Seeger, 1958) and Euro-centric orientation (Lomax, 1956 and 1959).

This project aims to determine the meanings, narratives and musical expressions by approaching popular music production in Turkey with descriptive and semiotic musical analytical methods. By this way, underutilized methods in popular music studies in Turkey would be attached to the analysis and evaluation for the first time, an alternative model not only for musicology but also other branches of social sciences would be introduced to the Turkish researchers, the details would be shared with scientists and researchers through a scientific report, articles in Turkish and English and a web site, and the raw data of the Project would be opened to further examinations.

The first descriptive musical analysis method to be used in this project is cantometricsdeveloped by Alan Lomax in order to diverge from musicology’s Euro-centric analytical terminology and context. The hypothesis behind this method is to consider popular/folk song as a summary of social and psychological patterns as well as musical patters. By adopting this hypothesis, the social, psychological and musical patterns would be appointed and the correlations between them would be revealed.
Second method that would be adapted by the listening form created by Dale Olsen (1995) is similarly based on the descriptive musical analysis of non-Western musical cultures. Here, Olsen’s listening form is chosen as a supplementary for the missing or underemphasized parameters in cantometrics. Thus cantometricsand Olsen’s listening form would constitute project’s descriptive part of musical analysis.

Third method is semiotic musical analysis and would be used to figure out at elements that provide communication through musical associations and connotations that are not expressed when the piece is written down. This method is actually an adaptation of a morpheme in linguistics. Like a morpheme, a musemeis the basic unit of musical expression which in the framework of one given musical system is not further divisible without destruction of meaning. In this way, musemesof popular music in Turkey would be identified and showed how they created the meaning of a notion or condition. Remembering that musical connotations in popular music are often constructed with the help of visual images, video clips of the selected songs would also be analyzed, and the relationship between audio and visual images would be revealed.