Sandeep Singh Solanki

An interesting comparison between a morning raga with an evening one using graphical statistics

Nella musica classica indiana l’esecuzione di un raga e destinata a un preciso momento della giornata. Il Bhairavi invece appartiene a un gruppo di raga, chiamati Sadabahaar, che possono essere eseguiti in qualsiasi momento. Il contributo presenta un interessante confronto tra un raga del mattino (Ahir Bhairav) e un raga della sera (Yaman) da un punto di vista statistico.

Time domain analysis of Indian classical raga rendition

The area of music information retrieval is very wide in general and Indian classical music in particular. Raga is the most significant aspect of Indian classical music which is further divided into Hindustani and Carnatic forms. One of the distinguishing features of the Hindustani classical music is the time of rendition of a raga. With contrasting opinions offered by musicians on the issue, with some being strict and others labeling it as purely imaginary, it is of interest to investigate whether there are any scientific aspects as to why the Hindustani ragas have been grouped for a particular time of rendition. This paper attempts to investigate audio features of different ragas which are rendered in morning, afternoon, evening and night.

Production, Perception and Cognition

This chapter is devoted to muse over the basic principles behind the making of music instead of presenting a synopsis of techniques and technologies used in modern day music production. In the introductory chapter we attempted a comprehensive definition of music. Let us add further that music as an acoustical emotive (except for the emotion of anger, disgust) communication, generally universal in nature. The simultaneity of the three elements acoustics, emotion, and universality (not in the absolute sense) is integral to the definition.

Automatic Musical Instrument Recognition

This chapter deals with analysis of musical instruments especially the Indian musical instruments by analyzing its sound. Sections 9.1, 9.2 and 9.3 concerns the automatic recognition of musical instruments with the idea that extract the perceptually relevant features from acoustic musical signals that a computer system “listen” to musical sounds and recognize which instrument is playing. For this, timbre of the sound of those musical instruments needs to be studied extensively. Only five musical instruments which are popularly adopted in Hindustani music were chosen for study.

Vadi-Samvadi Controversy and Statistics

There is a concept of alankar in Indian music, meaning a musical ornament. The shastras talk about shabdalankars and varnalankars. The varnas include sthayi (stay on a note), arohi (ascent), awarohi (descent) and sanchari (mixture of ascent and descent). The rising and falling transitions can be further classified into convex, concave and linear. We also have hats and valleys. A hat may be interpreted as an ascent followed by immediate descent, and a valley as a descent followed by immediate ascent. By making a count of all the above, we can study the transitory as well as non-transitory pitch movements between the notes.

Tonic Detection and Shruti Analysis from Raga Performance

The technological advances of modern times make it possible to have an in-depth analysis of songs of renowned singers of North Indian Classical music to objectively assess the vexing questions related to shrutis and swaras. Not only this, the issues related to musical scales in India are many, and to say the least, not simple.

Pitch Transition and Pitch Stability

The pitch is the fundamental parameter for understanding objectively various aspect of melodic music. A pitch contour describes a series of relative pitch transitions adjoining the abstractions of a sequence of steady states called notes. While the quasi stationary states in the dynamics of pitch in Indian music have been elaborately discussed in other chapters it is also necessary to pay attention to the transitory movements.

Scales and Shruti Concept

Music of modern days transcended the simplicity of early human music and its practical needs. The artistic and the aesthetic aspects began to emerge through its entertainment potential during the medieval times. Its beauty and serenity along with its potential to touch the emotional chord evoked intense interest among the earliest thinkers in every civilization and India is no exception. The recorded evidence of musical activities in India dates back to more than 2000 years.

Music Information Retrieval

Music is a very interesting topic in our society as almost everyone enjoys listening to it and many wants to create. Broadly speaking, the research in Music Information Retrieval (MIR) is one of the upcoming research interest with the extraction and inference of meaningful features from music (from the audio signal), indexing of music using these features, and the development of deferent search and retrieval schemes (for instance, content-based search, music recommendation systems, or user interfaces for browsing large music collections), as defined by Downie (2003).

Virtual instrumentation based night security system using speedy-33

This paper presents a LabVIEW based security system which will give the security information like video, audio, pictures of the covered region. The system consists of a simple robot, carrying a wireless Infrared (IR) night vision camera, an obstacle sensor and a wireless transmitter/receiver section for driving the motors of the robot. A DSP processor (NI speedy 33) used for controlling the motion of robot and processing the signal acquired from the robot. The video, sound acquisition and processing is realized in National Instrument (NI) LabVIEW programming environment. The advantages of using this software makes easy interface with the hardware, ease of learning, time saving and faster access to peripheral devices.