Quantized Melodic Contours in Indian Art Music Perception: Application to Transcription

Rāgas in Indian Art Music have a florid dynamism associated with them. Owing to their inherent structural intricacies, the endeavor of mapping melodic contours to musical notation becomes cumbersome. We explore the potential of mapping, through quantization of melodic contours and listening test of synthesized music, to capture the nuances of rāgas. We address both Hindustani and Carnatic music forms of Indian Art Music. Two quantization schemes are examined using stochastic models of melodic pitch. We attempt to quantify the salience of rāga perception from reconstructed melodic contours. Perception experiments verify that much of the rāga nuances inclusive of the gamaka (subtle ornamentation) structures can be retained by sampling and quantizing critical points of melodic contours. Further, we show application of this result to automatically transcribe melody of Indian Art Music.