Implicit Rāga Knowledge in the Kathmandu Valley

The term rāga is current not only in the classical traditions of North and South Indian music, where it is the subject of an extensive written and oral theory, but also in many non-classical traditions especially of religious music in South Asia. For example, devotional songs (dāphā) sung by groups of Newar farmers in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal, are regularly attributed to rāgas; but there is little explicit (i.e. verbally expressed) knowledge about rāga among the performers. The question whether the concept has any musical meaning in terms of melodic structure can only be investigated through comparative musical analysis combined with ethnographic observation. An earlier study (Grandin 1997) concluded that dāphā song melodies in one rāga share a set of characteristic melodic formulae and are thus constructed in a rāga-like way. The present study suggests that rāga-preludes sung before each dāphā song constitute melodic models that underlie song melodies. A common stock of preludes is known by different groups, but singers are not aware of this commonality. There is thus an implicit melodic system that does not depend on performers’ explicit knowledge. This situation can be understood in historical and social terms

Schemas and improvisation in Indian music

Indian classical musicians, like jazz musicians, display impressive ability to perform with an apparent fluency and spontaneity resembling that of normal speech. It has been suggested that this appearance of spontaneity, often labelled “improvisation”, relies largely on memorized materials, prepared in rehearsal and recalled sequentially in performance (Van Der Meer 1980, Slawek 1998). But there are occasions when no specific preparation is possible, for example when performers meet on the concert platform for the first time. Performers themselves differ in the degree to which they claim to be “improvising”, some emphasising the need for careful planning, others the desirability of spontaneity and risk-taking. An approach to understanding such phenomena would be to look at the cognitive schemas involved in Indian music performance, and the ways in which schemas can be spontaneously combined. According to cognitive psychology, a schema is a memory structure comprising an array of cognitive categories, which we acquire through repeatedly experiencing similar arrangements of facts or sequences of temporal events. Temporal schemas enable us to form expectations about a likely course of events, whether they are small-scale and relatively invariant (“scripts”), or larger-scale and variable in content (“plans”). Such schemas have been shown to be important components of style and structure in both notated music (Treitler, Gjerdingen) and oral verbal performance (Rubin). Cognitive anthropologists have distinguished cognitive (largely unconscious) and instituted (socially acknowledged or inscribed) schemas or models that convey foundational cultural meanings (Shore) and allow cultural competence (Bloch). Aspects of schema theory have clear relevance to the analysis of musical performance in oral musical cultures, whether we are looking at musical meanings, musical structure, or, it may be suggested, musical interactions. Analysis of a performance of Indian classical vocal performance suggests that “improvisation” in this case involves the spontaneous combination of multiple scripts and plans. These include a metrical schema, embodied in physical gestures and subdivided into smaller segments, a pitch schema or scale with added features of pitch hierarchy and prescribed melodic movement (the rāga), an arched contour schema, a verbal script (the song text), and small rhythmic ending-formulae (tihāī). Simultaneous combination as well as sequencing of these “given” elements enables soloist and accompanist to improvise coherently and in synchrony

Lokapañca: Analysing Structure, Performance and Meanings of a Temple Song in Nepal

The song Lokapañca belongs to the repertoire of a group of temple singers in the town of Bhaktapur, in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal. Such songs can be considered both as artefacts and as performance processes. The text and melody of Lokapañca can be considered as an artefact reflecting the identity and history of the temple and the group, and ultimately the social and political history of sacred singing in the Kathmandu Valley. In performance the compact structure of the song is "unfolded" in multiple antiphonal repetitions of each line according to a prescribed procedure, with changes of tempo and instrumental accompaniment. This performance process, shared with other songs, reflects the ethnographic context, generates emotional intensity and musical and psychological “flow”, and reinforces reciprocal relationships between members of the performing group. The dual character of the song as artefact and performance, structure and process, can be understood by reference to cognitive and cultural schemas extending beyond musical performance

Western listeners detect boundary hierarchy in Indian music: a segmentation study

How are listeners able to follow and enjoy complex pieces of music? Several theoretical frameworks suggest links between the process of listening and the formal structure of music, involving a division of the musical surface into structural units at multiple hierarchical levels. Whether boundaries between structural units are perceivable to listeners unfamiliar with the style, and are identified congruently between naïve listeners and experts, remains unclear. Here, we focused on the case of Indian music, and asked 65 Western listeners (of mixed levels of musical training; most unfamiliar with Indian music) to intuitively segment into phrases a recording of sitar ālāp of two different rāga-modes. Each recording was also segmented by two experts, who identified boundary regions at section and phrase levels. Participant- and region-wise scores were computed on the basis of "clicks" inside or outside boundary regions (hits/false alarms), inserted earlier or later within those regions (high/low "promptness"). We found substantial agreement—expressed as hit rates and click densities—among participants, and between participants’ and experts’ segmentations. The agreement and promptness scores differed between participants, levels, and recordings. We found no effect of musical training, but detected real-time awareness of grouping completion and boundary hierarchy. The findings may potentially be explained by underlying general bottom-up processes, implicit learning of structural relationships, cross-cultural musical similarities, or universal cognitive capacitie

Modelling the Syntax of North Indian Melodies With a Generalized Graph Grammar

Hierarchical models of music allow explanation of highly complex musical structure based on the general principle of recursive elaboration and a small set of orthogonal op- erations. Recent approaches to melodic elaboration have converged to a representation based on intervals, which al- lows the elaboration of pairs of notes. However, two prob- lems remain: First, an interval-first representation obscures one-sided operations like neighbor notes. Second, while models of Western melody styles largely agree on step- wise operations such as neighbors and passing notes, larger intervals are either attributed to latent harmonic properties or left unexplained. This paper presents a grammar for melodies in North Indian raga music, showing not only that recursively applied neighbor and passing note oper- ations underlie this style as well, but that larger intervals are generated as generalized neighbors, based on the tonal hierarchy of the underlying scale structure. The notion of a generalized neighbor is not restricted to ragas but can be transferred to other musical styles, opening new perspec- tives on latent structure behind melodies and music in gen- eral. The presented grammar is based on a graph represen- tation that allows one to express elaborations on both notes and intervals, unifying and generalizing previous graph- and tree-based approaches

Humanities and Engineering Perspectives on Music Transcription:

Music transcription is a process of creating a notation of musical sounds. It has been used as a basis for the analysis of music from a wide variety of cultures. Recent decades have seen an increasing amount of engineering research within the field of Music Information Retrieval that aims at automatically obtaining music transcriptions in Western staff notation. However, such approaches are not widely applied in research in ethnomusicology. This article aims to bridge interdisciplinary gaps by identifying aspects of proximity and divergence between the two fields. As part of our study, we collected manual transcriptions of traditional dance tune recordings by eighteen transcribers. Our method employs a combination of expert and computational evaluation of these transcriptions. This enables us to investigate the limitations of automatic music transcription (AMT) methods and computational transcription metrics that have been proposed for their evaluation. Based on these findings, we discuss promising avenues to make AMT more useful for studies in the Humanities. These are, first, assessing the quality of a transcription based on an analytic purpose; secondly, developing AMT approaches that are able to learn conventions concerning the transcription of a specific style; thirdly, a focus on novice transcribers as users of AMT systems; and, finally, considering target notation systems different from Western staff notation