Ornamentation in Hindustani Vocal Music

In Hindustani music (HM) melody is the most important factor to any performance. Usually, in Khayal singing the entire performance is based on a single raga (melodic mode/scale). Only a small portion of the total rendition is pre-composed; that is Bandish or compositions. To embellish the composition musicians use different types of musical patterns within the raga frame which are known as Alankar or ornaments (musical). There are a wide variety of ornaments. Its application is to some extent depending on gharana and of course on the singer’s cognitive and imaginative abilities. There are two fundamental elements used in improvisation: ‘alankars’ (musical ornamentation) and tanas (as per the old concept it was also a part of alankar). However, in this paper, we have intended to search for these musical ornamentations (alankaran/alankar) from some song signals. We have primarily considered meend (uninterrupted gliding between two or more notes) (Ghosh Laxmi Narayan (1975): Geet – Baddyam (part-1): Pub: Pratap Narayan Ghosh, 1st edition, Calcutta.), andolan (oscillations in the note region), gamaka (two notes alternation; i.e. S R-R-R S) and Murki. The key phrases and transition between notes provide strong cues to identify the underlying raga in Hindustani styles of Indian music. In this work, we consider the segmentation of selected aalap parts from audio signals of three renowned vocalists, and by computing on time series of automatically detected pitch values we have investigated the style of their vocal performance. The methods are investigated in the context of detecting the style of Hindustani vocal musicians from their performances.