A Deep Learning Based Approach for Janya Raga Classification in Carnatic Music

Janya Ragas are Carnatic music ragas derived from the fundamental ragas called Melakarta Raga, by the permutation and combination of various ascending and descending swaras. Raga recognition is an important task, essential to research in Music Information Retrieval in Indian Classical Music. Even though the automatic raga recognition methods have been widely adopted in Carnatic music, most of the existing methods are restricted only to Melakarta Ragas. It is an important task to identify the Melakarta Raga of a Janya Raga, especially for improved music recommendation performance. In this study, we used deep learning-based approach to address this problem. Music files were collected for 65 Janya Ragas belonging to seven Melakarta Ragas. Classification-based supervised deep learning models: 1D CNN, LSTM and 1D CNN-LSTM were used in the study. The models were implemented to learn similarities from 1–20 mean values of Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) features of audio samples, by using TensorFlow and Keras APIs. The results revealed that the 1D CNN-LSTM model outperformed the other models with an accuracy of 82.0%. In the future, 1D CNN-LSTM based Siamese neural networks can be introduced to reduce the dependence on large amounts of labeled audio data.