  Flamenco is a rich performance-oriented art music genre from Southern Spain
which attracts a growing community of aficionados around the globe. Due to its
improvisational and expressive nature, its unique musical characteristics, and
the fact that the genre is largely undocumented, flamenco poses a number of
interesting mathematical and computational challenges. Most existing approaches
in Musical Information Retrieval (MIR) were developed in the context of popular
or classical music and do often not generalize well to non-Western music
traditions, in particular when the underlying music theoretical assumptions do
not hold for these genres. Over the recent decade, a number of computational
problems related to the automatic analysis of flamenco music have been defined
and several methods addressing a variety of musical aspects have been proposed.
This paper provides an overview of the challenges which arise in the context of
computational analysis of flamenco music and outlines an overview of existing
approaches.
