A TWO-COMPONENT REPRESENTATION FOR MODELING GAMAKAS OF CARNATIC MUSIC

Continuous pitch movements called “gamakas” are key to Carnatic music, but are not included in its traditional notation system. Modeling the melodic and shape aspects of gamakas and how they are selected for phrases given as notation are interesting interrelated problems that have analogs in text to speech and expressive singing synthesis systems. Descriptive textual and graphical notation techniques have also been proposed as tools for studying gamakas. However, a concatenative model of phrase-level gamaka selection leads to a combinatorial explosion of possibilities to be selected from. We propose a “longest path” optimization algorithm for phrase-level selection of gamakas that solves this combinatorial explosion using a scoring function that expresses local continuity preferences; and a two-component “stage-dance” representation of gamakas which simplifies the scoring function by separating local melodic and shape continuity preferences. We analyzed a performance of a composition in this framework and found the approach to be able to imitate the phrase-level preferences exhibited by the performer.

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