Analyzing the Digital Note Progression of Ragas Within a Thaat Using Fractal Geometry

Abstract

Music is one of the oldest forms of art, something to experience and enjoy. In recent times we have seen a great interest of modern science interacting with this highly emotional and experiential phenomenon of music. Music is organized sound that is capable of conveying emotion; hence melody has to be ordered successions of musical notes and it is of interest to investigate if the successions depict a fractal nature. Successions are fractal if the incidence frequency F and the interval between successive notes i in a musical piece bear the relation: F = c/i D where D is the fractional dimension and c is a constant of proportionality. The present work compares four ragas within a thaat (a raga-group based on scale) using fractals. Two of the ragas are of restful nature and the remaining two restless. Our findings are very interesting. Fractal nature is found to be far more prominent in both the restless ragas! We propose to extend the work to other thaats also as well as compare ragas between thaats.