VocalNotes: Investigating the Perception of Note Pitch and Boundaries through Varying Transcriptions of Vocal Performances from Five Musical Cultures

The VocalNotes project investigated how expert traditional music listeners conceive of notes in vocal performances by studying similarities and differences in their transcriptions. Teams of experts from five musical traditions (Japanese folk song, Chinese bangzi opera, Russian traditional village singing, Alpine yodelling, and Romaniote Jewish chanting) each transcribed ~10 minutes of vocal recordings from their culture, where manual transcription consisted of segmentation and note pitch correction, starting from an automatically extracted pitch curve. The experts then compared their independent transcriptions and looked for factors which could have led to disagreements. Western staff notation is not suitable for investigating such variances, because it does not represent sufficiently fine gradations of pitch and timing. We therefore used tools that allowed more precise annotations, namely Tony for segmentation, and Sonic Visualiser for note pitch correction and transcription comparison. We found that overall agreement was prevalent and the concept of note was generally applicable for analysis of vocal performances. Yet in some contexts disagreements were abundant, with the note concept reaching its limits. We identified four primary contexts which led to disagreements across several musical cultures: 1) differences in cultural knowledge between the transcribers, 2) differences in interpreting syllabic boundaries, 3) intra-syllabic pitch changes, and 4) “voice splash” - abrupt pitch changes caused by vocal techniques or used as an expressive device. The VocalNotes dataset, containing the audio of the musical fragments, annotations, and song documentation, has been published for replicability and further research.