Automatic Interpretation of Chinese Traditional Musical Notation Using Conditional Random Field

For the majority of Chinese people, Gongchepu, which is the Chinese traditional musical notation, is difficult to understand. Tragically, there are fewer and fewer experts who can read Gongchepu. Our work aims to interpret Gongchepu automatically into western musical notation-staff, which is more easily accepted by the public. The interpretation consists of two parts: pitch interpretation and rhythm interpretation. The pitch interpretation is easily to solve because there is a certain correspondence between the pitch notation of Gongchepu and staff. However, the rhythm notations of Gongchepu cannot be interpreted to the corresponding notations of staff because Gongchepu only denotes ban (strong-beat) and yan (off-beat), and the notations of duration are not taken down. In this paper, we proposed an automatic interpretation model based on Conditional Random Field. Our automatic interpretation method successfully achieves 96.81% precision and 90.59% oov precision on a database of published manually interpretation of Gongchepu.