A knowledge-based approach to computational analysis of melody in Indian art music

Abstract

Knowledge representation technologies developed in the semantic web context can be utilized to bridge the gap between music information research and disciplines like musicology and music theory. This will greatly enhance the impact they have on each other. Further, it will facilitate a knowledge-guided comparison and integration of different models of the same musical concept. But the current development state of ontologies for music is limited in its scope to address these issues. There is a need to develop ontologies for concepts and relationships coming from music theory. In this article, we discuss the melodic concepts that constitute the rāga, the melodic framework of Indian art music, specifically in the context of creating ontologies. We present a first version of the rāga ontology, and discuss the challenges posed by modeling semantics of its substructures.