Maths, Computation and Flamenco: overview and challenges

TL;DR

This paper reviews the unique mathematical and computational challenges of analyzing flamenco music, a complex and largely undocumented art form, highlighting recent approaches and ongoing difficulties in computational music analysis.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of the challenges and existing computational approaches specific to flamenco music analysis, emphasizing its distinct characteristics.

Findings

Flamenco's improvisational and expressive nature complicates computational analysis.

Existing MIR methods often do not generalize well to flamenco due to its unique features.

Recent approaches have begun addressing specific musical aspects of flamenco.

Abstract

Flamenco is a rich performance-oriented art music genre from Southern Spain which attracts a growing community of aficionados around the globe. Due to its improvisational and expressive nature, its unique musical characteristics, and the fact that the genre is largely undocumented, flamenco poses a number of interesting mathematical and computational challenges. Most existing approaches in Musical Information Retrieval (MIR) were developed in the context of popular or classical music and do often not generalize well to non-Western music traditions, in particular when the underlying music theoretical assumptions do not hold for these genres. Over the recent decade, a number of computational problems related to the automatic analysis of flamenco music have been defined and several methods addressing a variety of musical aspects have been proposed. This paper provides an overview of the challenges which arise in the context of computational analysis of flamenco music and outlines an overview of existing approaches.