Makam Practice

— BPM
40%

Choose a piece from the library to begin.

Drag across bars to choose a passage Click a bar, drag or shift-click to extend
BPM

About

A practice tool for Ottoman/Turkish makam music: pick a piece, loop a passage, set the tempo and play along with a usul-aware metronome, with the microtones rendered as written.

Scores

The notation comes from SymbTr, the Turkish makam music symbolic data collection by M. Kemal Karaosmanoğlu, Burak Uyar and Sertan Şentürk, licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

The scores served here are modified from that collection and are shared onward under the same licence. This site is free, carries no advertising and is not monetised in any way.

What was changed
  • Pitch is taken from the Arel-Ezgi-Uzdilek columns rather than the raw 53-TET reading, so notation and playback agree.
  • Scores are converted from the original txt into a playback timeline and an MEI engraving source.
  • Repeated sections that are literally the same music are folded and printed once, with segno and D.S. marks. The played timeline is unchanged.
  • Section names are recovered from the lyrics column.
  • Titles, composers and makam, usul and form names are resolved to their proper spelling from the sibling mu2 headers.
  • Grace notes are parsed but omitted from playback.

The full notice sits beside the data, at scores/LICENSE.txt.

M. Kemal Karaosmanoğlu. A Turkish makam music symbolic database for music information retrieval: SymbTr. In Proceedings of 13th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR), pages 223–228, 2012.

Engraving and sound

Notation is engraved by Verovio (LGPL v3) using the Bravura music font (SIL OFL 1.1). Playback is synthesised in the browser — there are no recordings. Usul stroke patterns are hand-authored and each cites its source.