International Audio Laboratories Erlangen

A new archive of multichannel-multimedia field recordings of traditional Georgian singing, praying, and lamenting with special emphasis on Svaneti

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG MU 2686/13-1, SCHE 280/20-1). If you use data from this website, please cite:

1. Frank Scherbaum, Nana Mzhavanadze, Sebastian Rosenzweig, and Meinard Müller
   Multi-media recordings of traditional Georgian vocal music for computational analysis
   In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Folk Music Analysis: 1–6, 2019. Bibtex

   @inproceedings{ScherbaumMRM19_MultimediaRecordings_FMA,
   author    = {Frank Scherbaum and Nana Mzhavanadze and Sebastian Rosenzweig and Meinard M{\"u}ller},
   title     = {Multi-media recordings of traditional {G}eorgian vocal music for computational analysis},
   booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Workshop on Folk Music Analysis},
   address   = {Birmingham, UK},
   year      = {2019},
   pages     = {1--6}
   }

Background

This unique collection of 216 traditional Georgian chants was recorded by Frank Scherbaum and Nana Mzhavanadze during an exploratory field trip to Upper Svaneti/Georgia in summer 2016. The recordings comprise various chants sung by different groups and singers in different villages. A special property of this collection is the variety of recording devices used. Besides a camcorder for video recording and conventional stereo microphones to capture the overall impression, each of the singers was recorded separately with a headset microphone and a larynx/throat microphone.

Throat microphones pick up the vibrations of the singer's throat and convert them to an audio signal. In this way, unwanted environmental noise is not recorded by the microphones, leading to a reasonable voice quality even in loud environments. This effect is especially useful when recording polyphonic vocal music performances, since every throat microphone captures the voice of only one singer while suppressing the other singers' voices.

Synced annotations

The synced annotations can be downloaded in the following.

Recordings                               Search: