An Overview of Hindustani Music in the Context of Computational Musicology

With its origin in the Samveda, composed between 1500-900 BC, the art music of India has evolved through ages and come to be regarded as one of the oldest surviving music systems in the world today. This paper aims to provide an overview of the fundamentals governing Hindustani music (also known as North Indian music) as practiced today. The deliberation will mainly focus on the melodic aspect of music making and will attempt to provide a musicological base for the main features associated with the melody: intonation and improvisation; thus covering the soundscape on the micro as well as macro level. The larger objective of this endeavour is to identify relevant directions for the application of computational approaches to Hindustani music