Motivic analysis and its relevance to raga identification in carnatic music

Abstract

A raga is a collective melodic expression consisting of motifs. A raga can be identified using motifs which are/nunique to it. Motifs can be thought of as signature prosodic phrases. Different ragas may be composed of the same set/nof notes, or even phrases, but the prosody may be completely different. In this paper, an attempt is made to determine/nthe characteristic motifs that enable identification of a raga and distinguish between them. To determine this, motifs are first manually marked for a set of five popular raga by a professional musician. The motifs are then normalised/nwith respect to the tonic. HMMs are trained for each motif using 80% of the data and about 20% are used for testing. The results do indicate that about 80% of the motifs are identified as belonging to a specific raga accurately.