A Two-Component Representation For Modeling Gamakas Of Carnatic Music

Abstract

Continuous pitch movements called “gamakas” are key to Carnatic music, but are not included in its traditional no- tation system. Modeling the melodic and shape aspects of gamakas and how they are selected for phrases given as notation are interesting interrelated problems that have analogs in text to speech and expressive singing synthesis systems. Descriptive textual and graphical notation tech- niques have also been proposed as tools for studying gama- kas. However, a concatenative model of phrase-level gama- ka selection leads to a combinatorial explosion of possi- bilities to be selected from. We propose a “longest path” optimization algorithm for phrase-level selection of gama- kas that solves this combinatorial explosion using a scoring function that expresses local continuity preferences; and a two-component “stage-dance” representation of gamakas which simplifies the scoring function by separating local melodic and shape continuity preferences. We analyzed a performance of a composition in this framework and found the approach to be able to imitate the phrase-level prefer- ences exhibited by the performer.