Vocal Source Separation for Carnatic Music

Carnatic Music is a Classical music form that originates from the South of India and is extremely varied from Western genres. Music Information Retrieval (MIR) has predominantly been used to tackle problems in western musical genres and cannot be adapted to non western musical styles like Carnatic Music due to the fundamental difference in melody, rhythm, instrumentation, nature of compositions and improvisations. Due to these conceptual differences emerged MIR tasks specific for the use case of Carnatic Music. Researchers have constantly been using domain knowledge and technology driven ideas to tackle tasks like Melodic analysis, Rhythmic analysis and Structural segmentation. Melodic analysis of Carnatic Music has been a cornerstone in MIR research and heavily relies on the singing voice because the singer offers the main melody. The problem is that the singing voice is not isolated and has melodic, percussion and drone instruments as accompaniment. Separating the singing voice from the accompanying instruments usually comes with issues like bleeding of the accompanying instruments and loss of melodic information. This in turn has an adverse effect on the melodic analysis. The datasets used for Carnatic-MIR are concert recordings of different artistes with accompanying instruments and there is a lack of clean isolated singing voice tracks. Existing Source Separation models are trained extensively on multi-track audio of the rock and pop genre and do not generalize well for the use case of Carnatic music. How do we improve Singing Voice Source Separation for Carnatic Music given the above constraints? In this work, the possible contributions to mitigate the existing issue are ; 1) Creating a dataset of isolated Carnatic music stems. 2) Reusing multi-track audio with bleeding from the Saraga dataset. 3) Retraining and fine tuning existing State of the art Source Separation models. We hope that this effort to improve Source Separation for Carnatic Music can help overcome existing shortcomings and generalize well for Carnatic music datasets in the literature and in turn improve melodic analysis of this music culture

Thaat Classification Using Recurrent Neural Networks with Long Short-Term Memory and Support Vector Machine

This research paper introduces a groundbreaking method for music classification, emphasizing thaats rather than the conventional raga-centric approach. A comprehensive range of audio features, including amplitude envelope, RMSE, STFT, spectral centroid, MFCC, spectral bandwidth, and zero-crossing rate, is meticulously used to capture thaats' distinct characteristics in Indian classical music. Importantly, the study predicts emotional responses linked with the identified thaats. The dataset encompasses a diverse collection of musical compositions, each representing unique thaats. Three classifier models - RNN-LSTM, SVM, and HMM - undergo thorough training and testing to evaluate their classification performance. Initial findings showcase promising accuracies, with the RNN-LSTM model achieving 85% and SVM performing at 78%. These results highlight the effectiveness of this innovative approach in accurately categorizing music based on thaats and predicting associated emotional responses, providing a fresh perspective on music analysis in Indian classical music

Intonation Analysis of Rāgas in Carnatic Music

Intonation is a fundamental music concept that has a special relevance in Indian art music. It is characteristic of a rga and key to the musical expression of the artist. Describing intonation is of importance to several music information retrieval tasks such as developing similarity measures based on rgas and artists. In this paper, we first assess rga intonation qualitatively by analysing varN{dot below}aṁs, a particular form of Carnatic music compositions. We then approach the task of automatically obtaining a compact representation of the intonation of a recording from its pitch track. We propose two approaches based on the parametrization of pitch-value distributions: performance pitch histograms, and context-based svara distributions obtained by categorizing pitch contours based on the melodic context. We evaluate both approaches on a large Carnatic music collection and discuss their merits and limitations. We finally go through different kinds of contextual information that can be obtained to further improve the two approaches. © 2014 Taylor & Francis.This research was partly funded by the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Program, as part of the CompMusic project (ERC grant agreement 267583). J.S. acknowledges 2009-SGR-1434 from Generalitat de Catalunya, ICT-2011-8-318770 from the European Commission, JAEDOC069/2010 from CSIC, and European Social Funds.Peer Reviewe

Culturally sensitive strategies for automatic music prediction

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2012.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 103-112).Music has been shown to form an essential part of the human experience-every known society engages in music. However, as universal as it may be, music has evolved into a variety of genres, peculiar to particular cultures. In fact people acquire musical skill, understanding, and appreciation specific to the music they have been exposed to. This process of enculturation builds mental structures that form the cognitive basis for musical expectation. In this thesis I argue that in order for machines to perform musical tasks like humans do, in particular to predict music, they need to be subjected to a similar enculturation process by design. This work is grounded in an information theoretic framework that takes cultural context into account. I introduce a measure of musical entropy to analyze the predictability of musical events as a function of prior musical exposure. Then I discuss computational models for music representation that are informed by genre-specific containers for musical elements like notes. Finally I propose a software framework for automatic music prediction. The system extracts a lexicon of melodic, or timbral, and rhythmic primitives from audio, and generates a hierarchical grammar to represent the structure of a particular musical form. To improve prediction accuracy, context can be switched with cultural plug-ins that are designed for specific musical instruments and genres. In listening experiments involving music synthesis a culture-specific design fares significantly better than a culture-agnostic one. Hence my findings support the importance of computational enculturation for automatic music prediction. Furthermore I suggest that in order to sustain and cultivate the diversity of musical traditions around the world it is indispensable that we design culturally sensitive music technology.by Mihir Sarkar.Ph.D

MODELLING GAMAKAS OF CARNATIC MUSIC AS A SYNTHESIZER FOR SPARSE PRESCRIPTIVE NOTATION

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Mapping Textile Patterns into Sonic Experience

This portfolio contains seven works for a variety of ensembles and explores a number of distinct approaches of mapping textile patterns into musical parameters, incorporating various compositional techniques, such as microtonality, minimalism, serialism, and stochastic composition. The commentary examines the aesthetic links between the compositions through the exploration of the interaction of visuals and sonic art, analysing in detail the analogous features between them. It is not the intention of this commentary to inform the reader how to compose music that is derived from textile patterns. Instead, this commentary is to be viewed as a personal creative method, describing the concepts and techniques employed in the music. The commentary is divided into two parts. The first part aims to outline the general methods involved in the construction of textile patterns, focusing on possible relations with various musical parameters. The second part presents these ideas as realised in the practical setting of my compositional work, drawing on the diverse strands of my artistic practice