Classification of 72 Melakartha ragas using PAM clustering method: Carnatic music

Abstract

Carnatic music is a popular music in south Indian music. Carnatic ragas are the most critical combination of saptaSwaraswhich are arranged in Arohana(ascending) and Awarohana(descending).It is very challenging and interesting task to find the similarities among them thathelp the learning community to find which ragas are to be learned as a group. In this work we investigated the methods to find the similarity among 72Melakartha ragas using raga symbols as features. We considered raga signatures as text that represents the raga; by representing the raga structure in the form of feature matrix we investigated the similarity among the ragas using binary, cosine and Manhattan distance measures. Based on the similarity results we clustered the ragas. Further we took the expert opinion on this clustering of ragas and applied classification techniques to study the performance of classification algorithms.