Theorizing South Asian musics through diverse analytical lenses

I’m going to propose something on the principle of ‘reduction’ (kuraippu) in nāgasvaram music, focusing on its use in high-caste Hindu temples in Tamil Nadu. Beyond its technical understanding, the aim will be to examine, through the analysis of a performance, why this principle is central and makes sense in this devotional Hindu context.

I would like to present on the musical form of ‘ṭhāya’, which was part of the ‘Caturdaṇḍī’ (four pillars) system of music, apparently in vogue in the 15th-17th centuries. I have come across several palm-leaf manuscript notations of ṭhāya songs at the Thanjavur library in Tamil Nadu, South India, and have done some work with them in the last few years. Now, I would like to connect the information from the notations to the scanty theoretical references that are available, and also explore the possibility of a performance tradition, especially in the Maisuru school of Bharatanatya dance.

The 7 th- or 8 th-century CE music inscription at Kuḍumiyāmalai, in Tamil Nadu, South India, is the oldest surviving example of music notation from South Asia. This anonymous pedagogical document demonstrates extended melodies in the seven earliest known rāgas. Whereas theoretical texts and later notations are transmitted through a long tradition of manuscript copying, this inscription is an original document of the period, and is thus of unique importance for the history and theory of Indian music. But the notation presents unexplained features that have been interpreted as denoting microtonal pitch differences, instrumental techniques, rhythmic values, or melodic contour. The compositional principles, purposes and practical interpretation of the melodies are also open to question. Current advances in computational analysis of music allow the possibility of testing interpretations of the notation, illuminating the dynamics of the musical language, and reconstructing damaged portions of the inscription. In an ongoing collaborative project with experts in computational musicology (Marcus Pearce, Pablo Padilla, Alberto Alcalá Alvarez), the text of the notation has been digitized, and interrogated through statistical and information-theoretic approaches to test interpretations of the notation system. Using the same digital text, the melodic organization of the inscription is also examined from the perspectives of network theory and statistical pattern clustering.

Some fundamental features of Hindustani ragas will be discussed with an illustrative example. Impact of music therapy in general will be briefed followed by our experience of applying Hindustani ragas on patients with brain injury (cerebrovascular accident and diffuse head injury) admitted to RIMS hospital in Ranchi. Finally, the problem of amount of raga content determination in songs based on ragas will be addressed with its importance in helping a patient with non musical background derive the therapeutic benefits of raga.

The Hindustani tradition is well known both for its sophisticated tala system and range of techniques for developing complex rhythmic variations, and for its development of free rhythm alap. In recent years it has become possible to gather data relating to the movement of musicians from performance videos, using pose estimation algorithms such as OpenPose. Given the close relationship between rhythm and movement in music, what can this movement data tell us about the rhythmic structure of the music? In this paper I will illustrate the kind of data that can be generated and explore some of the ways in which it complements our existing knowledge about rhythm and tala in Hindustani music.

Temporal dynamics are among the cues to expressiveness in music performance in different cultures. In the case of Hindustani music, it is well known that expert vocalists often take liberties with the beat, intentionally not aligning their singing precisely with the relatively steady beat provided by the accompanying tabla. This becomes evident when comparing performances of the same composition such as a bandish. We present a methodology for the quantitative study of differences across performed pieces using computational techniques. This is applied to small study of two performances of a popular bandish in raga Yaman, to demonstrate how we can effectively capture the nuances of timing variations that bring out stylistic constraints along with the individual signature of a performer. This work articulates an important step towards the broader goals of music analysis and generative modelling for Indian classical music performance. Index Terms—Music information retrieval, Hindustani music, expressive performance, temporal dynamics, onset detection

TBC