Intonation Analysis of Rāgas in Carnatic Music

Intonation is a fundamental music concept that has a special relevance in Indian art music. It is characteristic of a r ga and key to the musical expression of the artist. Describing intonation is of importance to several music information retrieval tasks such as developing similarity measures based...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of new music research 2014-01, Vol.43 (1), p.72-93
Main Authors: Koduri, Gopala Krishna, Ishwar, Vignesh, Serrà, Joan, Serra, Xavier
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Carnatic music
Histogram parametrization
Information retrieval
Music
Music information research
Pitch analysis
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Summary:Intonation is a fundamental music concept that has a special relevance in Indian art music. It is characteristic of a r ga and key to the musical expression of the artist. Describing intonation is of importance to several music information retrieval tasks such as developing similarity measures based on r gas and artists. In this paper, we first assess r ga intonation qualitatively by analysing varṇaṁs, a particular form of Carnatic music compositions. We then approach the task of automatically obtaining a compact representation of the intonation of a recording from its pitch track. We propose two approaches based on the parametrization of pitch-value distributions: performance pitch histograms, and context-based svara distributions obtained by categorizing pitch contours based on the melodic context. We evaluate both approaches on a large Carnatic music collection and discuss their merits and limitations. We finally go through different kinds of contextual information that can be obtained to further improve the two approaches.
ISSN:0929-8215
1744-5027
DOI:10.1080/09298215.2013.866145