Sequential Pitch Distributions for Raga Detection

Abstract: Raga is a fundamental melodic concept in Indian Art Music (IAM). It is characterized by complex patterns. All performances and compositions are based on the raga framework. Raga and tonic detection have been a long-standing research problem in the field of Music Information Retrieval. In this paper, we attempt to detect the raga using a novel feature to extract sequential or temporal information from an audio sample. We call these Sequential Pitch Distributions (SPD), which are distributions taken over pitch values between two given pitch values over time. We also achieve state-of-the-art results on both Hindustani and Carnatic music raga data sets with an accuracy of 99% and 88.13%, respectively. SPD gives a great boost in accuracy over a standard pitch distribution. The main goal of this paper, however, is to present an alternative approach to modeling the temporal aspects of the melody and thereby deducing the raga.