Raga Identification using Repetitive Note Patterns from prescriptive notations of Carnatic Music

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that prescriptive notations in Carnatic music, despite lacking ornamentation details, can be used with stochastic models of repetitive note patterns to reliably identify ragas, outperforming melody-based methods.

Contribution

It introduces a novel stochastic model of repetitive note patterns from prescriptive notations for raga identification, highlighting the importance of note transitions over exact note positions.

Findings

SMRNP outperforms state-of-the-art melody-based techniques

Repetitive note patterns are key to raga characterization

Note transitions are more significant than note positions

Abstract

Carnatic music, a form of Indian Art Music, has relied on an oral tradition for transferring knowledge across several generations. Over the last two hundred years, the use of prescriptive notations has been adopted for learning, sight-playing and sight-singing. Prescriptive notations offer generic guidelines for a raga rendition and do not include information about the ornamentations or the gamakas, which are considered to be critical for characterizing a raga. In this paper, we show that prescriptive notations contain raga attributes and can reliably identify a raga of Carnatic music from its octave-folded prescriptive notations. We restrict the notations to 7 notes and suppress the finer note position information. A dictionary based approach captures the statistics of repetitive note patterns within a raga notation. The proposed stochastic models of repetitive note patterns (or SMRNP in short) obtained from raga notations of known compositions, outperforms the state of the art melody based raga identification technique on an equivalent melodic data corresponding to the same compositions. This in turn shows that for Carnatic music, the note transitions and movements have a greater role in defining the raga structure than the exact note positions.