Raga Identification by using Swara Intonation

In this paper we investigate information pertaining to the intonation of swaras (scale-degrees) in Hindustani Classical Music for automatically identifying ragas. We briefly explain why raga identification is an interesting problem and the various attributes that characterize a raga. We look at two approaches by other authors that exploit some of these characteristics. Then we review musicological studies that mention intonation variability of swaras across ragas, providing us a basis for using swara intonation information in raga recognition. We describe an experiment that compares the intonation characteristics for distinct ragas with the same set of swaras. Features derived from swara intonation are used in a statistical classification framework to classify audio segments corresponding to different ragas with the same swaras.