Shell midden people in northern Iberia. New data from the mesolithic rock shelter of J3 (Basque Country, Spain)

[EN]In the course of a sondage dug in the rock shelter of J3, in the Jaizkibel mountains (at the north-western tip of Guipúzcoa), the body of a adult man was located buried inside a shell midden. This shell midden had not been disturbed and presented internal stratigraphy features. In any case, the outer edge of the shell midden does show some interesting interdigitation with the adjacent habitational layers, with evidence of different stages of occupation. Within the shell midden itself, under the individual buried there, it was possible to observe layers without any ceramics, whereas the layers covering said individual included ceramic fragments. This individual has been dated to 8,300 BP and therefore corresponds to a Mesolithic context.

Music-Theoretic Estimation of Chords and Keys from Audio

This paper proposes a new method for local key and chord estimation from audio signals. This method relies primarily on principles from music theory, and does not require any training on a corpus of labelled audio files. A harmonic content of the musical piece is first extracted by computing a set of chroma vectors. A set of chord/key pairs is selected for every frame by correlation with fixed chord and key templates. An acyclic harmonic graph is constructed with these pairs as vertices, using a musical distance to weigh its edges. Finally, the sequences of chords and keys are obtained by finding the best path in the graph using dynamic programming. The proposed method allows a mutual chord and key estimation. It is evaluated on a corpus composed of Beatles songs for both the local key estimation and chord recognition tasks, as well as a larger corpus composed of songs taken from the Billboard dataset.