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Background and Aim: A raga is characterized by its distinctive melodic shape. The ability to perceive intricate melodic and pitch patterns depends on the Temporal Envelope (ENV) and Fine Structure (TFS). The present study aimed to understand the importance of temporal envelope and temporal fine structure cues in identifying ragas in Indian music. Methods: Twenty - one adult's musicians were included in the study. In experiment 1, professional musicians were involved in a raga identification task using music chimaeras. In experiment 2, the chimaeras were subjected to acoustic analysis using the envelope difference index, to understand better how the ENV and TFS changed depending on how many frequency bands were used to create the chimaeras. The subjective impression of a new group of trained musicians was then compared to these results. Friedman's test and Wilcoxon tests were carried out. Results: Results showed that both cues are crucial in a trade-off manner; when TFS are not significantly accessible, ENV aids in raga identification. It was reflected in experiment 1 as an increase in ENV scores and a decrease in TFS scores as the number of frequency bands increased. In experiment 2, the envelope difference index for ENV increases with a number of frequency bands, and it correlates with perceptual scores for ENV. Conclusion: The current study highlights the perceptual role of temporal cues in raga identification and directs future work for a temporal-based raga classifier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the management of schizophrenia, treatment remains sub-optimal despite significant advances in pharmacotherapy. Research evidence supports the role of complimentary therapy in the management of schizophrenia. Music Therapy is a form of complimentary therapy in which music is used within a therapeutic relationship to address physical, emotional, cognitive, and social needs of individuals. However, most of the studies involving Music Therapy as intervention have used and evaluated western forms of music. There are hardly any studies evaluating the impact of Indian classical ragas in these patients. The present paper is a pilot work on 4 patients diagnosed with schizophrenia with positive and negative symptoms who were exposed to 8 sessions, twice a week, of Indian classical music therapy in a tertiary care psychiatric facility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses important issues in the theory of meter by means of a detailed study of a particular form of non-isochronous (NI) meter, the North Indian rüpak täl. Rüpak täl is described as comprising 7 equal mâtrâs (time units), organized into three groups (3+2+2 mäträs), and is therefore non-isochronous at the group rather than the beat or subdivision level. The term "longform non-isochronous meter" is introduced to describe the phenomenon of metrical structures induding a non-isochronous pulse level with IOIs >1000ms, of which this is an example. This phenomenon is explored with the aid of empirical analysis of a corpus of recordings of rüpak täl performances, focusing particularly on vocal performances in khyäl style. This empirical data is considered in light of extant literature on Indian metrical organization, on ethnomusicological theories of aksak, on psychological theories of rhythm perception in NI-meters, and on metrical theory more broadly. The implications for a general theory of musical meter are then considered, leading to an argument that (a) while theorization is not a necessary condition of metrical perception, a recognized metrical pattern must be treated not only as a form of perception based on the entrainment of attention (London 2012), but as a form of culturally-shared knowledge contributing to top-down processing of meter; and (b) the theorization and representation of aspects of metrical structure means that metrical cycles are not limited to the extent of the psychological present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A prominent aspect of the notion of musical similarity across the music of various cultures is related to the local matching of melodic motifs. This holds for Indian art music, a highly structured form with raga playing a critical role in the melodic organization. Apart from the tonal material, a raga is characterized by a set of melodic phrases that serve as important points of reference in a music performance. Musicians acquire in their training a knowledge of the melodic phrase shapes or motifs particular to a raga and the proficiency to render these correctly in performance. This phenomenon of learned schema might be expected to influence the musicians' perception of variations of the melodic motif in terms of pitch contour shape. Motivated by the parallels between the musical structure and prosodic structure in speech, identification and discrimination experiments are presented, which explore the differences between trained musicians' (TMs) and non-musicians' perception of ecologically valid synthesized variants of a raga-characteristic motif, presented both in and out of context. It is found that trained musicians are relatively insensitive to acoustic differences associated with note duration in the vicinity of a prototypical phrase shape while also clearly demonstrating the heightened sensitivity associated with categorical perception in the context of the boundary between ragas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we analyse one particular interaction: the development of a self-consciously "Eastern"-sounding music within Western pop music. We understand this in the context of several "journeys to the East": some virtual (the interest in oriental religions, the adoption of Eastern musical forms) and some real (the journeys taken to the East by some musicians and by thousands of young people). We will consider, first, the milieu within which these changes took place, and then analyse the methods, scale and motivations of those Western artists who took inspiration from Eastern, mainly Indian, music in the 1960s and 1970s to create what became known as "raga rock." Our aim is to demonstrate that these developments added up to a "neo-orientalism": resembling the older, imperial orientalism in its tendency to simplify and romanticize the East, but different from it in the passionate sincerity of its admiration for certain Eastern forms, which were taken to the point of challenging dominant cultural and even political norms within the West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Predominant melody offers a complete representation of melodic contours of heterophonic Indian Art Music (IAM). A compact representation of melodic contours while preserving raga characteristics is proposed. Such representations have applications in music transcription, analysis, and synthesis. Contours are quantized on a pitch-time grid after normalizing critical points with tonic and rhythmic pulse period estimates. Non-uniform quantization intervals are selected from pitch and time scales prevalent in IAM, while accommodating pitch and inter-note-interval variations on pitch-time grid. An evaluation of quantized-reconstructed contours through listening tests by trained musicians shows raga preserving capabilities of the proposed approach in spite of alterations in contour shapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Syncretism is a well known phenomenon which bears the meaning of merging, melding and mixing different things to form a new concept. The concept of the term is very old and broadly used in different areas such as religion and culture. The function of syncretism is not only mixing or merging but also adopting different things and establishing link or bridge between similar things. Indian Classical Music is deeply influenced by the raga music as it is considered as the backbone of classical music. Raga has a wide history of its evolution that covers different dimensions. Syncretism plays a significant role in the evolution of raga ,as it has undergone various changes and reached at today's position .In this article it will my endeavor to cover the areas of evolution of raga on the basis of syncretism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of the present study was to investigate the efficacy of Raga Bhairavi for the promotion of spiritual wellness among aggressive adolescents. It was hypothesized that postintervention scores on spiritual wellness would be significantly higher as compared with preintervention scores. A pre- and postassessment design was adopted. The Spiritual Wellness Inventory (Elliott Ingersoll, 1995) and Aggression Questionnaire (Buss & Perry, 1992) were used to identify 32 adolescents with low spirituality and high aggression. A flute version of Raga Bhairavi was played for eight sessions. Scores were subjected to t test statistical comparison. Postintervention mean scores on subscales of spiritual wellness were comparatively higher than preintervention scores. Results revealed that raga therapy enhanced connectedness (t = 3.04; p < .01), meaning (t = 2.02; p < .05) and hope (t = 2.11; p < .05) dimensions of spiritual wellness. The difference between pre- and postintervention scores on aggression was also observed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the study of Carnatic raga identification using musical features. In Carnatic music, there are 72 melakartha ragas. Each raga is denoted by musical notes. The musical features of 72 main ragas are extracted. A number of features such as pitch, timbre, tonal, rhythmic features have been discussed with reference to their ability to distinguish different ragas. Due to the intricate nature of Carnatic music, the concept of neutrosophic logic is used to identify each raga. This is because the concept of neutrosophic logic lies in the neutralities present in between truth and false. This creates a component of indeterminacy, which will make raga identification more accurate and smooth. Neutrosophic Cognitive Maps (NCMs) are drawn based on the musical features and solved. Using neutrosophic logic, a reduced set of musical features is arrived for each raga which can be thought of features characterizing the raga. Each raga is classified using a set of musical features which are solutions of NCMs. This paper represents one of the first attempts to classify all 72 melakartha ragas of using neutrosophic logic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ragaand tonic are the basic elements based on which melody is constructed in Carnatic music.Ragais the framework for building melody where as tonic frequency establishes the base and aswarais identified (‘R’ or ‘G’ etc.) based on that base frequency. In this work, an effort has been made to identifyragaand tonic of a given piece of Carnatic music. The proposed method is divided into two phases. In the first phase, tonic andragahave been determined independently using the features extracted from pitch histogram. In the second phase,ragaand tonic are updated iteratively using the derived note information. In this work,ragawill be recognised based on the features extracted from probability density function (pdf) of pitch values extracted from the music clip. The raga identification is performed using different classifiers such as feedforward neural network model, Gaussian Mixture Models and decision trees. A mathematical model based on the parameters of pitch pdf is proposed for tonic identification. Proposedragaand tonic identification system is evaluated on two datasets: 213 music clips from 14ragasand CompMusic data-set (538 clips from 17 ragas). For first data-set, the average accuracy ofragaand tonic identification is found to be 90.14 and 94.83%, respectively. With CompMusic data-set, an average accuracy of 95% is achieved for raga identification. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the question of improvisation in the context of South Indian (Tamil) temple nāgasvaram music, with a focus on the genre ālāpana. It shows that improvisation and creativity rarely come into conflict with the conventions of genre, culture, and society and demonstrates--through a dialogic process between the musical analysis of the performance and the insights of the musicians on their own practice--that the emotional effectiveness of a musical phrase depends not only on its idiosyncratic qualities but also on the process that prepares it and the context in which it is enunciated. It challenges most ethnomusicological approaches, in which musical improvisation is thought in terms of models and not as much in terms of creativity and/ or agency in the heat of the performance, and calls for a better articulation of explanatory models with emic perceptions and lived experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]