Note: This bibliographic page is archived and will no longer be updated. For an up-to-date list of publications from the Music Technology Group see the Publications list .

Pitch Patterns of Cypriot Folk Music between Byzantine and Ottoman Influence

Title Pitch Patterns of Cypriot Folk Music between Byzantine and Ottoman Influence
Publication Type Master Thesis
Year of Publication 2011
Authors Panteli, M.
Abstract Music of Cyprus has received influence from other music traditions due to geographical and historical reasons. This thesis focuses on an investigation of Byzantine and Ottoman music influence as observed from the underlying pitch patterns. The notion of pitch patterns in this context comprises the tuning of the scale, the use of intervals and the prominence of scale degrees. A computational comparative analysis was applied on sung melodies of Cypriot music and mainly religious Byzantine and Ottoman music. This was an innovative approach in the analysis of Cypriot folk tunes as well as the empirical study of the tuning of Byzantine scales and its relations with Ottoman music. The proposed methodology was based on the use of pitch class profiles, specifically designed to integrate the particularities of these music traditions. Novel algorithms were particularly employed for the tasks of pitch histogram computation, smoothing and alignment and the challenges of scale note extraction. A combination of similarity measures was further proposed. Results revealed that the use of intervals in Cypriot music was rather equally similar to both traditions whereas the prominence of scale degrees shared some tendencies with Byzantine music. On the other hand, influence in the tuning of the scales showed more similarity with Byzantine music. Integration of Byzantine-Ottoman inter-dependencies in their relation to Cypriot music is left for future work.
Final publication https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1253743