A Survey of Raaga Recognition Techniques and Improvements to the State-of-the-Art

Raaga is the spine of Indian classical music. It is the single most crucial element of the melodic framework on which the music of the subcontinent thrives. Naturally, automatic raaga recognition is an important step in computational musicology as far as Indian music is considered. It has several applications like indexing Indian music, automatic note transcription, comparing, classifying and recommending tunes, and teaching to mention a few. Simply put, it is the first logical step in the process of creating computational methods for Indian classical music. In this work, we investigate the properties of a raaga and the natural process by which people identify the raaga. We survey the past raaga recognition techniques correlating them with human techniques, in both north Indian (Hindustani) and south Indian (Carnatic) music systems. We identify the main drawbacks and propose minor, but multiple improvements to the state-of-the-art raaga recognition technique.