Given a raga recording, can we scientifically verify which school of Vadi-Samvadi selection is supported by the artist?

Abstract

The notes which play the most important and second most important roles in expressing a raga are called Vadi and Samvadi swars respectively in (North) Indian Classical music. Like Bageshree, Bhairavi, Shankara, Hamir and Kalingra, Rageshree is another controversial raga so far as the choice of Vadi-Samvadi selection is concerned where there are two different opinions. Rather than ruling out any school of thought, the paper aims at identifying scientifically the particular school supported by a given recording. Thus the problem investigated here is one of classification in nature. In the present work, a two minute vocal recording of raga Rageshree is subjected to a careful statistical analysis. Our analysis is broken into three phases: first one minute, middle one minute and last one minute. Under a multinomial model set up holding appreciably in the first two phases, only one opinion is found acceptable. An interesting musical cocktail is proposed embedding several ideas like melodic property of notes, note combinations and pitch movements between notes, using some weighted combination of psychological and statistical stability of notes along with watching carefully the sudden shoot of one or more notes whenever there is enough evidence that multinomial model has broken down..