Statistical Machine Translation from Arab Vocal Improvisation to Instrumental Melodic Accompaniment

Fadi Al-Ghawanmeh (1) , Kamel Smaïli (2)

1 JU - The University of Jordan
2 SMarT - Statistical Machine Translation and Speech Modelization and Text

Vocal improvisation is an essential practice in Arab music. The interactivity between the singer and the instrumentalist(s) is a main featureof thisdeep-rooted musical form. As part of the inter-activity, the instrumentalist recapitulates, or translates, each vocal sentence upon its completion. In this paper, we present our own parallel corpus of instrumentally accompanied Arab vocal improvisation. The initial size of the corpus is 2779 parallel sentences. We discuss the process of building this corpus as well as the choice of data representation. We also present some statistics about the corpus. Then we present initial experiments on applying statistical machine translation to propose an automatic instrumental accompanimenttoArabvocalimprovisation. Theresults with this small corpus, in comparison to classical machine translation of natural languages, are very promising: a BLEU of 24.62 from Vocal to instrumental and 24.07 from instrumental to vocal.

Domaines: Informatique et langage [cs.CL]

Fadi Al-Ghawanmeh, Kamel Smaïli. Statistical Machine Translation from Arab Vocal Improvisation to Instrumental Melodic Accompaniment. Journal of International Science and General Applications, 2018, 1 (1), pp.11-17. ⟨hal-01873788⟩