Exploring the Correspondence of Melodic Contour with Gesture in Raga Alap Singing

Shreyas Manish Nadkarni, Sujoy Roychowdhury, Preeti Rao, Martin Clayton

Abstract

Musicology research suggests a correspondence between manual gesture and melodic contour in raga performance.Computational tools such as pose estimation from video and time series pattern matching potentially facilitate larger-scale studies of gesture and audio correspondence. We present a dataset of audiovisual recordings of Hindustani vocal music comprising 9 ragas sung by 11 expert performers. With the automatic segmentation of the audiovisual time series based on analyses of the extracted F0 contour, we study whether melodic similarity implies gesture similarity. Our results indicate that specific representations of gesture kinematics can predict high-level melodic features such as held notes and raga-characteristic motifs significantly better than chance.

About

This project was carried out by the Digital Audio Processing Lab, IIT Bombay and Department of Music, Durham University.

Supplementary Material

This webpage provides supplementary material for the paper - Explorting the Correspondence of Melodic Contour with Gesture in Raga Alap Singing. This paper will be presented at ISMIR 2023

The supplementary material has additional explanatory content, detailed tables, sample recordings and commentaries.

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Sample Videos for Phrase Segmentation Experiments

Sample Videos for Stable Note Detection Experiments

Exploring the correspondence of melodic contour with gesture in raga alap singing

  • Exploring the correspondence of melodic contour with gesture in raga alap singing