Identifying gamakas in Carnatic music

Abstract

In this work, an effort has been made to identify the gamakas present in a given piece of Carnatic music clip. Gamakas are the beautification elements used to improve the melody. The identification of gamaka is very important stage in note transcription. In the proposed method, features that correspond to melodic variations such as pitch and energy are used for characterizing the gamakas. The input pitch contour is modelled using Hidden Markov Model with 3 states, namely Attack, Sustain and Decay. These states correspond to ups and downs in the melody of the music. The system is validated using a comprehensive data set consisting 160 songs from 8 different ragas. The average accuracy of 75.86% is achieved using this method.