Characterization of Intonation in Karṇāṭaka Music by Parametrizing Context-based Svara Distributions

Intonation is a fffndamental mffsic concept that has a special relefiance in Indian art mffsic. It is characteristic of the rāga and intrinsic to the mffsical expression of the performer. Describing intonation is of importance to sefieral information retriefial tasks like the defielopment of rāga and artist similarity measffres. In offr prefiioffs flork, fle proposed a compact representation of intonation based on the parametrization of the pitch histogram of a performance and demonstrated the ffseffflness of this representation throffgh an exploratifie rāga recognition task in flhich fle classi ed 42 fiocal performances belonging to 3 rāgas ffsing parameters of a single sfiara. In this paper, fle extend this representation to employ context-based sfiara distribfftions, flhich are obtained flith a di erent approach to nd the pitches belonging to each sfiara. We qffantitatifiely compare this method to offr prefiioffs one, discffss the adfiantages, and the necessary melodic analysis to be carried offt in ffftffre.