Identifying Indian Classical Music Styles using Melodic Contours
Amruta Vidwans, Preeti Rao · 2012
A prominent categorization of Indian classical music is the Hindustani and Carnatic traditions. The distinction is geographical with the two styles having evolved under distinctly different historical and cultural influences. Both styles are grounded in the melodic and rhythmic framework of raga and tala. The styles differ along dimensions such as structure of a performance, aesthetics, voice production and instrumentation. In this work we explore methods to distinguish the two prominent styles by analysing the extracted melodic contour from audio segments of vocal performances. The assumption that style distinctions are represented in the melodic contour is validated via human listening tests. The presented features can be applied to achieve automatic classification of style.