Raga Identification of Carnatic music for Music Information Retrieval

In this work we propose a method to identify the raga of a Carnatic music signal. Raga is analogous to melody in Western music but is much richer and stronger in its representation. The main motive behind Raga identification is that it can be used as a good basis for music information retrieval of Carnatic music songs or Film songs based on Carnatic music. The input polyphonic music signal is analyzed and made to pass through a signal separation algorithm to separate the instrument and the vocal signal. After extracting the vocal signal we segment the vocal signal using our proposed segmentation algorithm. Using our proposed singer identification algorithm we determine the singer to know the fundamental frequency of the singer. The frequency components of the signal are then determined and we map these frequency components into the swara sequence and thereby determine the Raga of the particular song, which could be used to index the songs and further for retrieval based on the Raga.