A Comparison of Audio Preprocessing Techniques and Deep Learning Algorithms for Raga Recognition

Abstract: Ragas form the foundation for Indian Classical Music. The task of Raga Recognition has gained traction in the Music Information Retrieval community in the recent past, which can be attributed to the nuances of Indian Classical Music that have resulted in a plethora of research problems in Computing. In this work, we used two different digital audio signal processing techniques to preprocess audio samples of Carnatic classical ragas that were then processed by various Deep Learning models. Their results were compared in order to infer which DASP technique is better suited to the task of raga recognition. We obtained state of the art results, with our best model reaching a testing accuracy of 98.1%. We also compared each model ability to distinguish between similar ragas.