Svara-forms in Carnatic music: contextual influences on the performance of svara

Abstract

The performance of svaras (notes) in Carnatic music varies due to the influence of gamaka (ornamentation), rendering tasks such as automated transcription challenging. In this study, we identify the various forms taken by each svara in a single raga, and examine the extent to which the performance of any given svara is influenced by its preceding and succeeding melodic context and, additionally, by duration. We add 547 svara-level annotations of a new performance to an existing svara annotation dataset (giving a total of 2,077 annotations), enabling us to look at this question across performances and performers. Through a combination of automated distance-based clustering and expert curation, we identify 71 unique svara-form groups in raga Bhairavi and present a series of statistical analyses to demonstrate the dependency between the extent of melodic context and duration on svara performance. We provide all code, data and results in the accompanying Github repository