CHARACTERIZATION OF INTONATION IN CARNATIC MUSIC BY PARAMETRIZING PITCH HISTOGRAMS Gopala K. Koduri1, Joan Serra`2, and Xavier Serra1 1 Music Technology Group, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain. 2 Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA-CSIC), Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain.
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[email protected] ABSTRACT on the artist and the raaga [8, 15]. The study of intona- tion differs from that of tuning in its fundamental empha- Intonation is an important concept in Carnatic music that sis. When we talk about tuning we refer to the discrete is characteristic of a raaga, and intrinsic to the musical ex- frequencies with which we tune an instrument, thus it is pression of a performer. In this paper we approach the de- more of a theoretical concept than the one of intonation, scription of intonation from a computational perspective, with which we focus in the pitches used during a perfor- obtaining a compact representation of the pitch track of a mance. The two concepts are basically the same when we recording. First, we extract pitch contours from automat- study instruments that can only produce a fixed set of dis- ically selected voice segments. Then, we obtain a a pitch crete frequencies, like the piano. histogram of its full pitch-range, normalized by the tonic Given than in Indian music there is basically no instru- frequency, from which each prominent peak is automati- ment with fixed frequencies (the harmonium is an impor- cally labelled and parametrized. We validate such parame- tant exception), in practice tuning and intonation can be trization by considering an explorative classification task: considered the same.