Melodic and Metrical Elements of Expressiveness in Hindustani Vocal Music

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the expressive timing and pitch variations in Hindustani Khayal vocal performances, proposing computational methods to distinguish different renditions and exploring aesthetic aspects of musical expressiveness.

Contribution

It introduces computational representations for analyzing expressive elements in Hindustani vocal music and provides insights into performance variations among artists.

Findings

Computational methods can effectively discriminate between performances.

Expressive timing and pitch variations are key to musical expressiveness.

Analysis reveals artist-specific performance characteristics.

Abstract

This paper presents an attempt to study the aesthetics of North Indian Khayal music with reference to the flexibility exercised by artists in performing popular compositions. We study expressive timing and pitch variations of the given lyrical content within and across performances and propose computational representations that can discriminate between different performances of the same song in terms of expression. We present the necessary audio processing and annotation procedures, and discuss our observations and insights from the analysis of a dataset of two songs in two ragas each rendered by ten prominent artists.