Tuning Systems of Traditional Georgian Singing Determined From a New Corpus of Field Recordings

Abstract

In this study we examine the tonal organization of the 2016 GVM dataset, a newly-created corpus of high-quality multimedia field recordings of traditional Georgian singing (with focus on Svaneti) which we collected during the summer of 2016. Because of the peculiarities of the performance practice of traditional Svan singing (e.g, exhibiting a considerable gradual pitch drift and a non-western tuning system), we developed a new processing pipeline for the computational analysis of non-western polyphonic music which was subsequently used to determine the melodic and harmonic tuning systems for the complete 2016 GVM dataset. In this context, we investigated the stability of the obtained tuning systems from an ensemble-, a song-, and a corpus-related perspective to evaluate under what conditions a single tuning system might be representative for current Svan performance practice. Furthermore, we compared the resulting Svan tuning systems with the tuning systems obtained for the Erkomaishvili dataset (Rosenzweig et al. 2020) in the study by Scherbaum et al. (2020). In comparison to a 12-TET (12-tone-equal-temperament) system, the Erkomaishvili and the Svan tuning systems are surprisingly similar. Both systems show a strong presence of pure fourths (500 cents) and fifths (700 cents), and ‘neutral’ thirds (peaking around 350 cents) as well as ‘neutral’ sixths. In addition, the sizes of the melodic and the harmonic seconds in both tuning system differ systematically from each other, with the size of the harmonic second second (close to 200 cents) being systematically larger than the melodic one (often between 150 and 180 cents). The current results underline the need for new unbiased representation forms for non-western music as they raise serious questions with respect to the practice of transcribing traditional Georgian music into a western notation system in which neither the ‘neutral’ intervals nor the gradual pitch drifts can be appropriately represented.