Overview of automatic Indian music information recognition, classification and retrieval systems

Abstract

In recent time conventional ways of listening to music, and methods for discovering music, such as radio broadcasts and record stores, are being replaced by personalized ways to hear and learn about music. There is abundant research and experimentation done over Western music. However, moderate amount of work noticed over Indian music and its related fields such as computational musicology and artificial intelligence to the realm of Indian music [1]. On the other hand, Indian music has adequate history and slowly it is becoming an international phenomenon. This has opened a wide opportunity for an Indian music discovery system which can suggest music based either on known artists or on simple descriptive terms. Hence researchers from various domains such as music processing, computer engineering and artificial intelligence etc. are contributing more towards Indian music processing. Eventually Indian music is broadly classified into South Indian Carnatic music and North Indian Hindustani music. Both the systems of music are rich in their own style and Carnatic music is much more complex in the way the notes are arranged and rendered [11]. Apart from these two broader categories, there are various types of Indian music. They are folk, tribal, bhajans or devotional, bhangra, Indi-pop, film songs, fusion and ghazals. This paper presents an overview of previous works on automatic Indian music information recognition, classification and retrieval. Furthermore the comparative study of the recognition, classification and retrieval techniques effectiveness based on various factors is also presented. © 2011 IEEE.