HIERARCHICAL CLASSIFICATION OF CARNATIC MUSIC FORMS

We address the problem of classifying a given piece of Carnatic art music into one of its several forms recognized pedagogically. We propose a hierarchical approach for classification of these forms as different combinations of rhythm, percussion and repetitive syllabic structures. The proposed 3-level hierarchy is based on various signal pro-cessing measures and classifiers. Features derived from short term energy contours, along with formant informa-tion are used to obtain discriminative features. The statis-tics of the features are used to design simple classifiers at each level of the hierarchy. The method is validated on a subset of IIT-M Carnatic concert music database, com-prising of more than 20 hours of music. Using 10 s au-dio clips, we get an average f-ratio performance of 0.62 for the classification of the following six typesof Carnatic art music:/AlApana/, /viruttam/, /thillAna/, /krithi/, /thani-Avarthanam/and/thAnam/