Raga is the melodic framework of Indian art music. It is a core concept used in composition, performance, organization, and pedagogy. Automatic raga recognition is thus a fundamental information retrieval task in Indian art music. In this paper, we propose the time-delayed melody surface (TDMS), a novel feature based on delay coordinates that captures the melodic outline of a raga. A TDMS describes both the tonal and the temporal characteristics of a melody, using only an estimation of the predominant ...
Raga is the melodic framework of Indian art music. It is a core concept used in composition, performance, organization, and pedagogy. Automatic raga recognition is thus a fundamental information retrieval task in Indian art music. In this paper, we propose the time-delayed melody surface (TDMS), a novel feature based on delay coordinates that captures the melodic outline of a raga. A TDMS describes both the tonal and the temporal characteristics of a melody, using only an estimation of the predominant pitch. Considering a simple k-nearest neighbor classifier, TDMSs outperform the state-of-the-art for raga recognition by a large margin. We obtain 98% accuracy on a Hindustani music dataset of 300 recordings and 30 ragas, and 87% accuracy on a Carnatic music dataset of 480 recordings and 40 ragas. TDMSs are simple to implement, fast to compute, and have a musically meaningful interpretation. Since the concepts and formulation behind the TDMS are generic and widely applicable, we envision its usage in other music traditions beyond Indian art music.
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