COMPUTATIONAL ANALYSIS OF MELODIC MODE SWITCHING IN RAGA PERFORMANCE Nithya Shikarpur1 Asawari Keskar2 Preeti Rao1 1Department of Electrical Engineering, 2Department of Physics Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India {nithyas, prao}@ee.iitb.ac.in ABSTRACT also been successfully differentiated with pitch distribu- tions that exploit the differences in intonation and empha- Melodic mode shifting is a construct used occasionally by sis across the common set of svara [3]. A particular raga skilled artists in a raga performance to enhance it by bring- performance construct that has not received much atten- ing in temporarily shades of a different raga. In this work, tion computationally is melodic mode switching. As in we study a specific North Indian Khyal concert structure other modal music, it is possible to develop a large number known as the Jasrangi jugalbandi where a male and female of scales by means of the modal shift by using any note singer co-perform different ragas in an interactive fashion. of a raga as the tonic and building a new set of scales by The mode-shifted ragas with their relatively displaced as- maintaining the intervals or ratios between the notes and sumed tonics comprise the identical set of scale intervals the tonic [4]. Termed ‘murchana’, this is a subtle form of and therefore can be easily confused when performed to- modulation (similar to key modulation from a major to its gether. With an annotated dataset based on available con- relative minor) and is used by skilled musicians to tem- certs by well-known artists, we present an analysis of the porarily bring in shades of another raga during a perfor- performance in terms of the raga characteristics as they are mance. manifested through the interactive engagement. We anal- In this work, we specifically consider a recent but yse both the aspects of modal music forms, viz. the pitch widely acclaimed development in the North Indian Khyal distribution, representing tonal hierarchy, and the melodic classical music scenario of mode-shifted ragas performed phrases, across the sequence of singing turns by the two together in concert by a pair of singers. Motivated by a de- artists with reference to representative individual perfor- sire to create a space where a male and a female singer can mances of the corresponding ragas. perform together in spite of the ½ octave difference typ- ical of their vocal pitch ranges, the two ragas are chosen 1. INTRODUCTION such that the M (the lower octave fourth) of the higher- pitched voice serves as the S (tonic) for the lower-pitched Ragas are melodic modes that underpin all performances voice with all actual note values (i.e. in terms of fun- of Indian art music across both the North Indian (Hin- damental frequency or MIDI number) being identical in dustani) and South Indian (Carnatic) traditions. There the two [5]. Figure 1 shows the scales of the pentatonic are dozens of ragas in common practice, distinguished by raga pairs considered in this paper. With the concert drone their salient melodic properties which include the choice typically tuned to the Sa of the female voice, the singers of tonal material, the hierarchy of notes (svara), their in- strive to maintain the character of their respective ragas tonation and typical phrasal contexts and, finally, the asso- in the ‘jugalbandi’ performance that interleaves the two ciation with a particular mood. A drone sounds the tonic singers’ voices in equally weighted roles, as in what may throughout the concert making the relative intervals of all be considered a ‘call and response’ musical format. What the notes clearly apparent to the listener providing, thus, makes it particularly interesting is that the call and the re- strong cues to the raga identity in terms of the correspond- sponse, both improvised, are drawn from different ragas. ing tonal material and hierarchy, and the melodic phrases. With a common set of notes, the challenge lies in meaning- Automatic raga identification from computed pitch class fully linking the phrases during the interaction while also histograms, normalised by the concert tonic, have worked carefully preserving the individual raga-specific character- well, especially when ragas with different tonal material istics. There are occasional episodes of singing together. appear in the dataset [1, 2]. Ragas with the identical The above discussed form, known as the "Jasrangi ju- scale notes relative to the tonic such as allied ragas have galbandi" after proponent Pt. Jasraj, has been performed over the past decade by a handful of well-known Hin- dustani vocalists drawing from a limited number of raga © N. Shikarpur, A. Keskar, and P. Rao. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). pairs [6]. The chosen raga pairs presumably satisfy the Attribution: N. Shikarpur, A. Keskar, and P. Rao, “Computational anal- music theory and aesthetic requirements for the simulta- ysis of melodic mode switching in raga performance”, in Proc. of the neous presentation in the jugalbandi concert format. In 22nd Int. Society for Music Information Retrieval Conf., Online, 2021. the present work, we carry out the computational analy- Feature Abhogi Kalavati Chandrakauns Madhukauns A(f) Aaroh SRgMDS_ SGPDnDS_ SgMdNS_ SgmPnS_ M D S R g M D S K(m) Avaroh S_DMgMgRS S_nDPGPGS S_NdMgMgSN. S S_nPmgS Vadi, S, M P, S M, S P, S S G P D n S G P Samvadi Nyas S, R, M, D S, P, D S, M, N S, m, P (a) DSRg, MRS, SGPD, PDnD, SgMgS, NS, Sgm, PmgmP, Char. RD. SRg, MgRS, GPDS_, GPDP, gMdNS_, NdS_, mPnS_, C(f) Phrases MDS_ GPGS NdMgMgS S_nPmg S g M(m) M d S M d S Table 1. Raga grammar details; dots over and under indi- S g P n S g P cate upper and lower octave pitches respectively N N (b) m m 70 Chandrakauns Madhukauns Figure 1. The solfege of each raga superposed on the stan- 60 Both dard keyboard. ‘S’ denotes the tonic note of the raga. We 50 see that the same set of keyboard notes is shared across 40 ragas in each pair. (a) Abhogi (A) and Kalavati (K); (b) 30 Duration (s) Chandrakauns (C) and Madhukauns (M). Ragas A and C 20 are sung by the female (f) artist of the corresponding pair, 10 ragas K and M by the male (m). 0 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 Start time of turn (s) ses of the melodic content of available Jasrangi jugalbandi (shortened to "JJ" in this paper) concerts in two differ- Figure 2. Turn duration versus start time plotted separately ent raga pairs. Specifically, we seek to answer questions for each singer and for the simultaneous (both) singing for around the JJ concerts with reference to the correspond- a C-M JJ song from our dataset ing normally performed individual ragas that can possibly be addressed with computed melodic representations. An important question is the extent to which raga characteris- dataset, summarised in Table 2, comprises recordings from tics are preserved when performed in the context of a JJ the Hindustani music corpus Dunya compiled as part of song. Considering that the interaction between singers is the CompMusic project [7–9] supplemented by available the main highlight of a JJ performance, we are also inter- YouTube audio content by well-known Khyal artists, espe- ested in analysing the melodic relationships of the call and cially for the relatively more scarce JJ concerts. The cho- response format. The larger goal for this empirical study is sen recordings are vocal performances accompanied by the to derive the structure or schema of the JJ concert in terms tanpura (drone), tabla and harmonium. The JJ concerts are of the individual raga presentations and the dynamics of manually segmented into male, female and simultaneous- the interaction between the two artists. Apart from its value singing episodes or turns Figure 2 illustrates the temporal to music appreciation and pedagogy, the insights obtained sequence of singing turn durations across the three labels could serve to identify new raga pairs that potentially fit for one of our C-M JJ songs. We note the dominance of the format for future JJ performance. In the next section, solo singing with roughly equal durations across the two we present our dataset with descriptions of the represented artists, an important characteristic of the JJ format. The raga pairs. The manual annotation and the observations di- simultaneous singing episodes are relatively short and are rectly derivable from this are provided. The melodic repre- observed to correspond to the refrain (mukhda) of the song sentations considered in this work are discussed next. Our and sometimes the long held notes. experimental analyses are presented with a discussion of Our melodic analysis is based on vocal pitch contours the observations and the implications of the outcomes. automatically extracted from the audio recordings. The pre-trained 4-stems Spleeter model [10] is used to obtain 2. DATASET & AUDIO PROCESSING the vocals component from the stereo mixtures. While not trained on Indian art music, the model produces vocals There have been about 7 distinct raga pairs in publicly with either absent, or low enough, levels of the accompany- performed JJ concerts so far. We select, for our work, ing melodic instruments for the ensuing vocal pitch detec- the two raga pairs that are best represented in the pub- tion step to work reliably. The regions of the separated vo- licly accessible JJ concert recordings. These are the pen- cals, corresponding to the previously labeled solo singing tatonic raga pairs, Abhogi-Kalavati (A-K henceforth) and regions, are processed for F0 detection at intervals of 10 ms Chandrakauns-Madhukauns (C-M).