Pasibutbut

The Bubun people of Taiwan have a ritual chant called Pasibutbut. It's supposed to bring a good millet harvest. It has rich polyphony - t traditionally there are eight singers in a ring. I can't find much written information about the notes, harmonies, tuning, whatever, so I'm gonig to figure this one out myself from audio recordings. I haven't really done that before. Nervous.

I'm going to try analyzing three videos, so that if one of them is non-standardly performed or badly performed, I'll still get a sense of the thing.

Video one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyHR49hpAOI

Video two: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fy14ZUoO9c

Video three: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ggweiEVd8U

It's very slowly evolving music. You might want to watch it at an increased speed if you're more interesting in the music's structure than its timbres.

I'm going to try analyzing the audio in Melodyne, which I haven't used before. Nervous.

...

I'll start with video 2. I like that it doesn't have a huge group of singers like video 1, and I think I prefer its audio quality to video 3.

The opening singer is not constant with his tone. He repeatedly starts closer to Ab/G# and then rises closer to A. It sounds very much like a moan. I thought I'd be able to analyze at least two notes before getting into trouble, but I don't even know if this should be one note or two or several glissandos.

It's about 50 cents sharp of a 12-TET Ab3. I'll just call it Ab3 and adjust all of my notes up 50 cents. We'll see how long that works. Next come in F4 and Ab4. Our first chord is [P1, M6, P8]. The M6 drops out for a moment giving us an octave, [P1, P8]. And then it comes back in a major 2nd lower at Eb, so we get [P1, P5, P8]. There might also be an octave below Eb. An octave below a perfect fifth is a perfect negative second, [P-2, P1, P5, P8]. Is it dumb to write chords like that? Maybe.

If you analyze the audio with the "melodic" detection algorithm, the software attempts to give you a monophonic analysis, which looks terrible for this piece. But you can still click individual notes to loop them and figure out the notes. And there's no clicking when samples start and stop like I get in Audacity, so that's an improvement. If I switch the detection algorithm to Polyphonic Sustain or Polyphonic Decay, then there notes from multiple voices are laid out in parallel, but I don't know how to click them to hear them to verify that the sound matches the placement. They're greyed out.

Ah, I got Melodyne "Essential", which is intentionally crippled in its features. I'm not going to tell you which version is supposed to work, because that would be advertising, and this is bullshit. They advertise $25 dollars so that you buy the wrong thing and then charge $150 more to upgrade. I wouldn't have paid that initially and I certainly won't pay that now.

The {Eb}s drop by M2 to {Db}s. And there might be an Ab below that also, so it's like [Ab2, Db3, Ab3, Db4, Ab4]. I think that's all that's happening. It's a little hard to tell.

Then F comes in again, which is M6 over Ab. 

Oh, I should try Clam Chordata. Or something.