Abstract:
Chant is a melody which is exist in church with an Ethiopian Christian religion. It is one
part of song in Ethiopian orthodox church which is the most ancient spiritual practices and
part of most religions and spiritual paths. Due to this, scholars or priests had used different
accompanying instruments and features of song for better expression of their feeling.
Drums and cymbals are instruments which used in Ethiopian Orthodox church for the
purpose of hymn with different chanting levels. There are ten type of chants which
classified based on their own properties. We considered only the five types of chants which
songs with drums and cymbals instrument in prediction which are song frequently, but the
chants which are song without drums and cymbals are not song frequently that are not
available. Regarding to this we collected an audio chant sound data from Bahir dar
Orthodox churches like S.t Giworgis cathedral church, Abune Gebere Menfes kidus
church, Bezawit S.t mariam church, Kidane mihret church, S.t gebreal church on Sunday
and feast days in which for kum 102, mereged 84, niuse mereged 120, tsifat 123 and wereb
126 using voice recorder and audio recorder tools. Then after we applied a signal
processing approach in MATLAB software application and preprocessed the collected
signal using techniques like silence removal, noise removal, framing, preemphasis and
windowing, and feature extracted techniques like MFCC, LPCC and combined features
using GMM algorithm. In addition, we used implementation techniques such as Audacity,
audio converter and audio cutter. To evaluate the prediction accuracy, from the total of 555
data sets 80% were used for training and the remaining 20% was used for testing. We had
compared the prediction feature vectors of MFCC, LPCC and combination of two with
GMM and we predicted a well-known Chant levels like kum, Mereged, nius Mereged,
tsifat and wereb which are song based on drums and cymbals instrumental sounds by
combining MFCC and LPCC feature vectors with better result performance. The
experimental result for kum, mereged, niuse mereged, tsifat and wereb is 76.1%, 81.9%
,83.3% ,84.7% and 85.8% respectively which were obtained using combined features. The
overall prediction accuracy was 82.4%