Characterization of intonation in Carnatic music by parametrizing pitch histograms

Abstract

Intonation is an important concept in Carnatic music that/nis characteristic of a raaga, and intrinsic to the musical expression/nof a performer. In this paper we approach the description/nof intonation from a computational perspective,/nobtaining a compact representation of the pitch track of a/nrecording. First, we extract pitch contours from automatically/nselected voice segments. Then, we obtain a a pitch/nhistogram of its full pitch-range, normalized by the tonic/nfrequency, from which each prominent peak is automatically/nlabelled and parametrized. We validate such parametrization/nby considering an explorative classification task:/nthree raagas are disambiguated using the characterization/nof a single peak (a task that would seriously challenge a/nmore na¨ıve parametrization). Results show consistent improvements/nfor this particular task. Furthermore, we perform/na qualitative assessment on a larger collection of raagas,/nshowing the discriminative power of the entire representation./nThe proposed generic parametrization of the intonation/nhistogram should be useful for musically relevant/ntasks such as performer and instrument characterization.