Carnatic Music and the Concept of Ragas

Carnatic music is viewed as one of the most established frameworks of music in the world.
Carnatic music is an extremely complex arrangement of music that requires much thought, both
aesthetically and in fact. The premise of Carnatic music is the arrangement of ragas (melodic
scales) and talas (cadenced cycles). There are seven rhythmic cycles and 72 fundamental ragas.
All the other ragas are considered to have begun from these. An intricate example exists for
recognizing these scales, known as the 72 Melakarta Raagas. Tyagaraja, Muthuswami Dikshitar
and Shyama Shastri, the three legendary composers of the nineteenth century, have composed
thousands of krithis that stay new among performers and rasikas. The most vital claim to fame
of Carnatic music is its exceedingly reverential component. The idea of the structures are set
altogether against a reverential diagram. The notes of Carnatic music is Sa Ri Ga Ma Pa Dha
Ni. These are nothing but the abbreviations of the genuine names of the Saptha (7) swaras
which are Shadjam, Rishabham, Gandharam, Madhyamam, Panchamam, Dhaivatam and
Nishaadam.

Each Saptha Swara has up to three varieties. The only exceptions for this are the two base notes
shadjam and panchamam, Sa & Pa which have only one form, and madhyamam, the middle
swara, which has only two notes. These variations of the Saptha Swaras give birth to new
Ragas that invoke different emotions in the heart of listeners. The Ragas specify a set of rules
which say which Swaras need to be sung and how they need to be sung. This is specified the
Aarohanam and the Avarohanam, also known as the ascending scale and the descending scale
respectively. Aarohanam is the ascending scale as the consecutive swaras increase in frequency
in the same octave. Avarohanam is the descending scale where the swaras decrease in
frequency in the same octave. Professional artists sing in three Sthayis, which are more
commonly known as ocatves. The higher octave is known as Tara Sthayi, the lower, Mandara
sthayi and the middle octave, Madhyama Sthayi. Majority of the song is usally sung in the
middle octave while the improvisations might include more of the other two octaves.
There are mainly two types of Ragas, Janaka Ragas and Janya Ragas. All the 72 Melakartha
Ragas are all Jananka Ragas. Janaka Ragas are the ragas that have all seven notes in the
Aarohanam and the Avarohanam. Janya Ragas are derived from the Janaka Ragas and may
include a note less or a variation of the note in either the Aarohanam or the Avarohanm. For
example, the Raga Mohana is a Janya of the Melakartha Raga Shankarabharana. The nishadha
and madhyama taken out from Shankarabharana gives rise to Mohana.
From the above paragraphs it is evident that Ragas have complex structures designed by well-
defined rules and considering the amount of work done on Audio Signal Processing and Music
Genre Classification in the field of Western Music, there is comparatively very little work done
on Automatic Raga Identification. Though the little work done on Raga Classification focuses
only on the identification of the Swaras, which will be discussed in Chapter 3, there is no study
that incorporates the techniques of Machine Learning, considering the rise in popularity of
Machine Learning in the recent years.

Goals
 1. To process Carnatic audio samples using standard and improvised audio processing
techniques and then extract features which represent the Raga-aspects in them.
2. To train and build a supervised Machine Learning model from the extracted features.
3. To provide a user interface to identify the Raga from an unknown Carnatic music
sample using the trained Machine Learning model.
Motivation
The main idea behind opting to implement this project comes down to two aspects. Firstly,
given the numerous advancements in the field of audio processing and genre classification,
there hasnt been a significant amount of interest that has been shown towards Carnatic music
especially with respect to the automatic identification of Ragas. Secondly, from an application
standpoint, an app like Shazam, which identifies Bollywood tracks, or Sound Hound, which
identifies Western songs, an app to recognize Ragas or Carnatic Krithis which can be used by
aspiring artists and enthusiasts, is truly missing. Hence, this is our motivation both from a
research standpoint as well as an application standpoint for choosing this project.

Methodology
Implementation of this project consists of the following steps:
1. Downloading Carnatic concerts of great artists from youtube.com.
2. Splitting the songs to extract only the parts with Ragas Kalyani, Kambhoji,
Shanmukhapriya and Thodi.
3. Processing the downloaded wav files in audacity and generating the Raga Dataset.
4. After Raga dataset creation, extracting two types of features MFCC and Vienna,
generating a feature matrix and corresponding array of labels.
5. Using the features to train three classifier models using supervised machine learning
algorithms like Random Forest Classifier, Support Vector Machines and Gaussian Nave
Bayes.
6. Analysis of the three models by calculating their accuracy metrics.
7. Creating Android app and Flask endpoint to provide an interface to test unknown tracks
to identify the Raga.