Motivic analysis and its relevance to raga identification in carnatic music

Bellur, Ashwin; Ishwar, Vignesh; Murthy, Hema A.

Motivic analysis and its relevance to raga identification in carnatic music

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Citation

Ishwar V, Bellur A, Murthy H. Motivic analysis and its relevance to Raga identification in carnatic music. In: Serra X, Rao P, Murthy H, Bozkurt B, editors. Proceedings of the 2nd CompMusic Workshop; 2012 Jul 12-13; Istanbul, Turkey. Barcelona: Universitat Pompeu Fabra; 2012. p. 153-157

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.