Studies on identification of Raga using short pieces of Taan : A signal processing approach

Abstract

The paper reports on the study of whether some short pirces of taan, a fast rendering of notes in a raga contains completely objective information for identifying the raga. For this purpose four ragas namely Bhairav, Darbari Kannada, Mian-ki-Malhar and Todi are chosen. Taan portions are selected from kheyal style rendering of these four ragas by four accomplished singers of different gharanas. Only pitch files extracted from the recorded signals are used. Correlation coefficients and a modified correlation are used for both the identification of identifiers and the classification the raga of 58 taan pieces. Identifiers are about 1.5 second long. Cognitive informations like, scale, note or grammar are not used. The study indicates that taan pieces do contain substaintial information for identifying a raga.