TANSEN: A System for Automatic Raga Identification

Computational Musicology is a new and emerging field which draws heavily from Computer Science, particularly Artificial Intelligence. Western Music has been under the gaze of this community for quite some time. However, Indian music has remained relatively untouched. In this paper, which is an illustration of the application of techniques in AI to the study of Indian music, we present an approach to solve the problem of automatic identification of Ragas from audio samples. Our system, named Tansen, is based on a Hidden Markov Model enhanced with a string matching algorithm. The whole system is built on top of an automatic note transcriptor. Experiments with Tansen show that our approach is highly effective in solving the problem.