THE USE OF MELODIC SCALES IN BOLLYWOOD MUSIC: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY Monojit Choudhury Ranjita Bhagwan Kalika Bali Microsoft Research Lab India fmonojitc, bhagwan, [email protected] ABSTRACT ever, as far as we know, till date there are no quantitative and statistical analysis of musical styles of Bollywood, ex- Hindi film music, which is commonly referred to as cept for a recent study that analyzes Bollywood song lyrics “Bollywood” music, is one of the most popular forms of through computational linguistic techniques [3]. music in the world today. One of the reasons for its popu- In this paper, we present a quantitative study of the rela- larity has been the willingness of Bollywood composers to tive usage and popularity of various melodic scales in Bol- adopt and be influenced by various musical forms includ- lywood over a period of seven decades. We analyzed the ing Western pop, jazz, rock, and classical music. How- scales used in 310 songs from 1953 to the present day, all ever, till date, we are unaware of any systematic quantita- of which have been in the top 50 hit list for the year they tive analysis of how this genre has changed and evolved appeared in. Our results show that some scales have waned over the years since its inception in the early 20th century. in popularity over the years, while some other scales have In this paper, we study the evolution of Bollywood mu- always dominated the mix. We also identified five influ- sic with respect to the use of melodic scales. We analyse ential music composers of Bollywood from different time songs composed over seven decades using a database of periods and analyzed the usage of musical scales in their top-lists, which reveals many interesting patterns. We also compositions. Again we noticed several interesting com- analyze the scale usage patterns in the music of some of the poser specific trends. For instance, some composers like most popular composers, which clearly brings out certain Allahrakka Rahman and Rahul Dev Burman, show great idiosyncrasies and preferences of each of them. diversity in the usage of musical scales in their compo- sitions, while others such as Shankar-Jaikishan or Pritam 1. INTRODUCTION Chakraborty preferred to exploit the melodic patterns of a few popular scales. The Mumbai based Hindi language film industry, which is The study of melodic scales in Bollywood music is par- 1 popularly referred to as Bollywood , produces more than ticularly interesting because since its inception in the early 2 800 movies every year . Almost all Bollywood movies 20th century and until the 1960s, Hindi film songs were feature several songs that are very popular in India, and almost exclusively based on or inspired by Indian Classi- have often been termed as the heartline of Indian popu- cal Music (ICM). A characteristic feature of ICM is its use lar culture [1, 11]. In fact, Bollywood songs are one of of a large number of scales. Hence, we expect Hindi film 3 the most searched items on the Web from India . Over music to exhibit a similar diversity of scale usage than that decades, this music has influenced lives and cultures not found in the popular music of other cultures. However, the just in India, but across all of Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, decreasing influence of ICM, and the gradually increasing and more recently, North America [7]. Several scholars influence of folk, rock, pop and blues on this genre can in the past [2] have attributed this universal popularity of significantly alter the scale usage pattern over time. Thus, Bollywood music to its great ability in assimilating vari- by studying the evolution of scale usage patterns in Bol- ous styles of music from around the world and churning lywood, we can, in essence, objectively characterize the out compositions of global appeal. The cultural history of influence of various musical cultures as well as individual Bollywood, the emergence of musical styles, genres and composers on Bollywood. sub-genres, and corresponding ethnomusicological aspects have been well studied by social scientists [5,9,10]. How- 2. MELODIC SCALE OF A SONG 1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollywood 2 http://geography.about.com/od/culturalgeography/a/bollywood.htm 2.1 Definition of a Scale 3 http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist2010/regions/in.html Bollywood music, along the lines of ICM, uses the stan- dard twelve note (in an octave) Western chromatic scale. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for Any given composition uses only a subset of these twelve personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are notes, which can be loosely referred to as the melodic scale not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies of the composition. This is a relative scale or mode-based bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. system, where the intervals between the adjacent notes are c 2013 International Society for Music Information Retrieval. fixed, but not the notes themselves. Once the tonic, the NICM Sa kom. Re Re kom. Ga Ga Ma teevra Ma Pa kom. Dha Dha kom. Ni Ni Notation SrRgGmMPdDnN Western CC# or Db DD# or Eb EFF # or Gb GG# or Ab AA# or Bb B Table 1. Names and notations of the notes in NICM along with their Western counterparts. kom. stands for komal meaning a flat note. teevra is a sharp note. first note of the octave referred to as Sa in Indian musical Scale NICM name Western name traditions (equivalent to Do in Solfaggio), is set to a spe- S R G m P D N Bilawal* Major Diatonic cific note (say C or Ab) the rest of the notes in the scale S R g m P D N Patdeep Melodic Minor gets automatically defined. Table 1 introduces the names S r G m P d N Bhairav* Major Gypsy of the notes used in Indian music and the notation that we S R g m P d N Kirwani Harmonic Minor will use in this paper along with the corresponding note in S R G m P D n Khamaj* Mixolydian Western music when the tonic is on C. S R g m P D n Kafi* Dorian Like Western music, the most common scale types in S R G m P d n Charukeshi Major Minor ICM are heptatonic, i.e., consist of seven notes. There- S R g m P d n Asavari* Natural Minor fore, the two dominant classical musical traditions preva- S r g m P d n Bhairavi* Phrygian lent in India today, the Hindustani or the North Indian SRGMPDN Kalyan* Lydian Classical Music (NICM) and the Carnatic or the South In- S r G M P D N Marwa* Not known dian Classical Music (SICM), deem the heptatonic scales S r G M P d N Purvi* Chromatic Hypo- to be fundamental; all other scales – pentatonic, hexatonic lydian and (rarely) octatonic are considered to be derived from S r g M P d N Todi* Chromatic Lydian a parent heptatonic scale. Musicologists in both the tradi- Inverse tions [4,6] have extensively studied and proposed the defin- ing features of the heptatonic scales used in the respective Table 2 systems. A detailed discussion on these theories is beyond . List of heptatonic scales used in NICM. The Thaat the scope of this paper, though it suffices to mention here names are marked with *. that in NICM tradition, from which Bollywood music has derived its main genetic material, a basic heptatonic scale (staff) notations are not readily available for Bollywood can have only one of the two Re’s, Ga’s, Ma’s, Dha’s songs 5 , we resort to music experts to identify the notes and Ni’s. This leads to 32 possible fundamental scales, and hence the scale of a song. When the set of notes used of which only ten are traditionally identified as important can be easily identified as a heptatonic scale (which almost 4 or fundamental for deriving other scales and ragas [4]. always maps to one of the scales listed in Table 2), we These scales are referred to as thaats. We shall refer to unambiguously mark the scale of the song with its corre- these scales by their corresponding thaat names. However, sponding name. Whenever a note and its flatter or sharper there are some more scales that are presently used in NICM version are used in the same song (less than 10% in our (often borrowed from popular ragas, e.g., Charukeshi and dataset), one of the notes is marked as accidental based on Kirwani, in SICM system). Table 2 lists all these popu- the expert’s intuition. This often involves looking at the lar heptatonic scales used in NICM. We shall refer to these frequency of usage, as the accidentals are used much less scales by the name of the thaat if it is one of the 10 thaats frequently than the other note which is a part of the scale. described by Bhatkhande, else we will refer to them by the Once the accidentals are so identified, it is easy to map the name of a popular raga based on this scale. One should rest of the notes into one of the heptatonic scales. note that a raga and a scale are not equivalent, it is just There are a substantial number of Bollywood compo- a naming convention that we will follow in this paper, and sitions that use scales with fewer than seven notes.