Styles and Rhythms of Musical Transitions in Indian Ragas: An Acoustical Exploration

The salient feature of Indian Classical Music (ICM) is the Raga system. Every Raga is defined as a unique musical framework consisting of different note combinations and transitions among them rendered as different phrases. In ICM, the commonly used musical features are ‘Nyash’, ‘Meend’, ‘Andolan’ and ‘Sparsh’, where each term refers to a particular kind of note-to-note transition, specific to every Raga and are responsible for correctly portraying the nature and mood of the Raga. These articulations, if extracted and acoustically analyzed for different Ragas, might lead to new information regarding the contribution of rhythmic and temporal distributions of notes and note-to-note transitions on emotion regulation. In this study, we have taken two Raga pairs (each pair consisting of the same musical notes)—(a) Bhairav and Kalingda and (b) Marwa and Sohini—and studied the nature of the above-mentioned articulations in detail. Using various linear spectral features like spectral skewness, centroid, pitch contour, etc. the acoustical waveforms of the chosen Raga clips have been classified using their source characteristics. We aim to develop a proper systematic and mathematical dissemination for these unique features as well as a learning paradigm for this age-old cultural heritage of India.