Raga Space Visualization: Analyzing Melodic Structures in Carnatic and Hindustani Music

EasyChair Preprint 15397

Abstract

The concept of raga in Indian classical music serves as a complex, multifaceted melodic entity that can be approached through various perspectives. Compositions within a raga act as foundational structures, serving as the bedrock for improvisations. Analyzing their textual notations is easier and more objective in comparison with analyzing audio samples. A significant amount of musical insights can be derived from the discrete swara sequences alone.

This paper aims to construct an intuitive visualization of raga space, using swara sequences from raga compositions. Notations from public sources are normalized, and their TF-IDF features are projected into a low-dimensional space. This approach allows for qualitative analysis of both Carnatic and Hindustani ragas, mapping them to known raga theory.

Keyphrases: Carnatic and Hindustani Music, Indian Classical Music, Raga, Raga Space, SWARA, TF-IDF, dimensionality reduction, feature extraction, t-SNE, visualization

@booklet{EasyChair:15397,
  author    = {Soham Korade and Suswara Pochampally and Tk Saroja},
  title     = {Raga Space Visualization: Analyzing Melodic Structures in Carnatic and Hindustani Music},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 15397},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2024}}