Funding: NYU global seed grant ($149,946).

Investigators: Carlos Guedes (NYU Abu Dhabi), Godfried Toussaint (NYU Abu Dhabi), Juan Bello (NYU New York), and Robert Rowe (NYU New York).

We propose to construct and analyze a significant digitally-encoded corpus of audio recordings from the Middle East and environs to support research into the behavior and development of rhythm in the musics of the region. This project will act in support of the ongoing Abu Dhabi Institute-supported grant “Cross-disciplinary and multicultural perspectives on musical rhythm.” As we have begun this work, we have encountered a breakthrough opportunity to collaborate with Le Centre de Recherche en Ethnomusicologie (CREM) in Paris. Through this collaboration we will gain unprecedented access to CREM’s digital collection of music from the world, while working with them on the development of a digital archive of music from the Middle East based on their extensive analog holdings of unique recordings. CREM is responsible for maintaining and managing the sound archives of Le Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) Musée de l’Homme, including unreleased analog field recordings of music from around the world, collected from 1900 to the present. CREM already has a repository of 30,000 recordings in an online database, and a 15-year plan to gradually digitize and structure its entire collection. This grant would allow us to help them accelerate the process for their middle-eastern collection in particular, in return for access to their entire digital collection for analysis purposes.

With this project we aim at creating a digital repository of Middle Eastern music that is suitable for large-scale analysis, allowing the extraction of features that can yield a deeper understanding of the rhythmic structure of this repertoire. At the same time, analysis on the entire CREM digital collection will allow us to understand cross-cultural differences and commonalities, as well as demonstrating how Middle Eastern music has influenced and been influenced by music from other regions. This proposal should be considered a work package under the umbrella project “Cross-disciplinary and multicultural perspectives on musical rhythm” currently led by the proposing team. The project proposed here arose from the necessity of gathering and accessing a large corpus of sound recordings for data-driven analysis using the techniques of Music Information Retrieval (MIR). The result of this proposal would be the first robust and organized repository that is freely available to researchers of this music. Moreover, the proposed activities are complementary to ongoing efforts at gathering a substantial collection of original audio recordings of pearl-diving music from Kuwait, Carnatic music percussion, as well as digitizing smaller existing collections of Middle Eastern music developed for ethnomusicological studies. All of this data needs to be processed, structured and archived in a unified manner. We will benefit from the proposed collaboration with CREM, which has developed the open-source platform Telemeta for facilitating the construction of digital sound archives, and with NYUAD’s library, which has extensive experience in music digitization and cataloguing, and is committed to building up its catalog of Middle Eastern music in coordination with our project.