A continuous time model for Karnatic flute music synthesis

Abstract

Gamakas, the essential embellishments, are integral parts of Karnatic music. Synthesising any form of Karnatic music necessitates proper modelling and synthesis of different gamakas associated with each note. We propose a spectral model to efficiently synthesize gamakas for Karnatic bamboo flute music from the notes, duration and gamaka information. We model three different components of the flute sound, namely, pitch contour, harmonic weights and time domain amplitude envelope. Cubic splines are used to parametrically represent these components. Subjective analysis of the results shows that the proposed method is better than the existing spectral methods in terms of tonal and aesthetic qualities of gamaka rendition. Hypothesis test results show that the observed improvements over other methods are statistically significant at 95% confidence interval.