A Comparative Study Of Indian And Western Music Forms

Music in India has very ancient roots. Indian classical music is considered to be one of the oldest musical traditions in the world but compared to Western music very little work has been done in the areas of genre recognition, classification, automatic tagging, comparative studies etc. In this work, we investigate the structural differences between Indian and Western music forms and compare the two forms of music in terms of harmony, rhythm, microtones, timbre and other spectral features. To capture the temporal and static structure of the spectrogram, we form a set of global and local frame-wise features for 5genres of each music form. We then apply Adaboost classification and GMM based Hidden Markov Models for four types of feature sets and observe that Indian Music performs better as compared to Western Music. We have achieved a best accuracy of 98.0% and 77.5% for Indian and Western musical genres respectively. Our comparative analysis indicates that features that work well with one form of music may not necessarily perform well with the other form. The results obtained on Indian Music Genres are better than the previous state-of-the-art.