A musical information retrieval system for Classical Turkish Music makams

Musical information retrieval (MIR) applications have become an interesting topic both for researchers and commercial applications. The majority of the current knowledge on MIR is based on Western music. However, traditional genres, such as Classical Turkish Music (CTM), have great structural differences compared with Western music. Then, the validity of the current knowledge on this subject must be checked on such genres. Through this work, a MIR application that simulates the human music processing system based on CTM is proposed. To achieve this goal, first mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) and delta-MFCCs, which are the most frequent features used in audio applications, were used as features. In the last few years deep belief networks (DBNs) have become promising classifiers for sound classification problems. To confirm this statement, the classification accuracies of four probability theory-based neural networks, namely radial basis function networks, generalized regression neural networks, probabilistic neural networks, and support vector machines, were compared to the DBN. Our results show that the DBN outperforms the others.