Finding Changes in the Tonic of Indian Classical Music

Public project summary

When singing from sheet music, how does the individual know where to start the base note? Indian classical music’s answer to this question is shruti or tonic. A performer selects a tonic (base pitch) based on their vocal range, and that tonic is used throughout their performance. In order to create automated systems which can understand Indian classical music, information about tonic is vital. This research focuses on Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs), a popular feature in speech recognition and music information retrieval. Using a correlational research approach on a database of over 1,000 audio samples, this project aims to find correlational indicators of tonic in the MFCCs.