Identification of carnatic raagas using hidden markov models

Raaga identification is one of the key areas for budding Carnatic musicians and avid listeners. Identification and knowledge of the raaga of a song not only implies knowledge of music but also helps establish the mood of a song. We propose to identify a Carnatic raaga by extracting from the music sample, information about the 12 distinguishable frequencies in an octave. The proposed technique is Specmurt analysis which involves the analysis of a signal in its log-frequency domain. The extracted information is fed to the Hidden Markov Model back-end system where each raaga has its associated model. © 2011 IEEE.