Detection of Melodic Patterns in Automatic Transcriptions of Flamenco Singing

The spontaneous expressive interpretation of melodic templates is a fundamental concept in flamenco music. Consequently, the automatic detection of such patterns in music collections sets the basis for a number of challenging analysis and retrieval tasks. We present a novel algorithm for the automatic detection of manually defined melodies within a corpus of automatic transcriptions of flamenco recordings. We evaluate the performance on the example of five characteristic patterns from the fandango de Valverde style and demonstrate that the algorithm is capable of retrieving ornamented instances of query patterns. Furthermore, we discuss limitations, possible extensions and applications of the proposed system.