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
