Academic literature on the topic 'Vocal music India'

The gestures that accompany improvisation in Indian vocal music, like the gestures that accompany speech, are closely co-ordinated with vocalization. Though linked to what is being sung, these movements are not determined by vocal action; nor are they taught explicitly, deliberately rehearsed, or tied to specific meanings. Students tend to gesture recognizably like their teachers, producing lineage-based gesture dialects, but the gestural repertoire of every vocalist is nonetheless idiosyncratic. This paper aims to trace a brief history of song gesture in India, and to show some of the links between gesture and vocalization. It also adapts Katharine Young’s theory of the “family body” to the transmission of gesture dialects through teaching lineages. Gesture and sound are taken to be parallel channels for the expression of melody.

"French composer and pianist Maurice Delage wrote several significant works inspired by his personal contact with the Orient. His travels to India inspired Delage to use innovative sound effects in his compositions, as well as to require his performers to adapt their vocal or instrumental technique to obtain the sound desired by the composer. His representation of the Orient is not a mere evocation of the Other, as is the case with most orientalist works, rather it reflects the composer’s desire to endow Western music with the purity, strength, and vivid colors which he discovered and admired in Indian music. The present paper presents the historical and artistic background which inspired and influenced Delage, the relationship between France and India in the early 20th century and reveals the composer’s idealistic point of view regarding India, its culture, and its music. The analysis focuses on the mélodie cycle Quatre poèmes hindous, composed between 1912 and 1913, striving to reveal the Indian influences in the work of Delage and the way orientalism is represented in French music from the first decades of the 20th century. Keywords: orientalism, France, India, 20th century, Maurice Delage"

This article attempts to explore the performativity that surrounds choral music in contemporary India. 1 1 Choral music was discovered in Western civilization and Christianity. As a starting point, it had the Gregorian reforms of the 6th century. Choir primarily refers to a vocal ensemble practising sacred music inside church settings as opposed to chorus which indicates vocal ensembles performing in secular environments. Multiple singers rendered sacred polyphony 1430 onwards. By the end of the century a standardized four-part range of three octaves or more became a feature. The vocal parts were called superius (later, soprano), altus, tenor (from its function of ‘holding’ the cantus-firmus) and bassus (Unger 2010, 2–3). Moving beyond its religious functions, the Shillong Chamber Choir locates itself within various sounds. Hailing from Meghalaya in the north- eastern part of India, the Shillong Chamber Choir has many folksy and original compositions in languages such as Khasi, Nagamese, Assamese and Malayalam. However, what brought them national fame was the Bollywoodisation 2 2 Bollywood refers to the South Asian film industry situated in Mumbai. The term also includes its film music and scores. of the choir. With its win in the reality TV Show, India’s Got Talent 3 3 India’s Got Talent is a reality TV series on Colors television network founded by Sakib Zakir Ahmed, part of Global British Got Talent franchise. in 2010, the Shillong Chamber Choir introduced two things to the Indian sound-scape—reproducing and inhabiting the Bollywood sound within a choral structure, and introducing to the Indian audience a medley of songs that could be termed ‘popular’, but which ultimately acquired a more eclectic framework. Medley is explored as a genre. The purpose of this article is to understand how ‘Bollywood Broadway’ is the mode through which choral renditions and more mainstream forms of entertainment are coming together.

The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between world music preferences and multicultural attitudes of nonmusic-major undergraduate students. The World Music Preference Inventory (WMPI) and the Multicultural Attitude Inventory (MAI) were administered to 50 undergraduate nonmusic majors. Two scores were determined from the WMPI (composite preference and composite correct identification) for eight world music style categories: Africa, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Middle East, and Thailand. No significant correlations were found between the composite preference score and composite correct identification score. There was, however, a significant correlation between the composite preference score and the composite MAI score. Furthermore, significant correlations were found among the preference subscores of all style categories, indicating that subjects' preferences for the eight world musical style categories were similar. Analyses revealed that there was a significantly higher degree of preference for instrumental excerpts than for vocal excerpts.

This paper presents an analysis of the relationship between gesture and music in the context of a Karnatak vocal lesson recorded in Tamil Nadu, South India in September 2011. The study aims to examine instances of correspondence between gesture and sonic event that occur during the lesson. Through this analysis the paper aims to contribute to the wider debate on the factors that determine gesture. Shape and trajectory are used in this study as means of describing and comparing gestures. The teacher’s hand movements are tracked and traced rendering the gestures as static shapes in still images, and developing lines in moving images. The correspondences found between gestures and sonic features are discussed in relation to the physical movement required to produce the music. In addition, the circumstances in which correspondence is not found are analyzed and the extent to which the dynamic form of gesture is also influenced by the phrase as a whole is emphasized.

<p>It seems that the majority of research on music-related body motion has so far been focused on Western music, so this paper by Lara Pearson on music-re&shy;lated body motion in Indian vocal music is a most welcome contribution to this field. But research on music-related body motion does present us with a number of chal&shy;lenges, ranging from issues of method to fundamental issues of perception and multi&shy;modal integration in music. In such research, thinking of perceptually salient fea&shy;tures in different modalities (sound, motion, touch, etc.) as shapes seems to go well with our cognitive apparatus, and also be quite practical in representing the fea&shy;tures in question. The research reported in this paper gives us an insight into how trac&shy;ing shapes by hand motion is an integral part of teaching Indian vocal music, and the approach of this paper also holds promise for fruitful future research.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p>

There is also a rich tradition of music in India. Few countries have found such an old and rich tradition of music. Indian music has an inspiring Siva and Saraswati which means that human beings cannot develop such high art without any divine inspiration, only on their own strength. Music existed in India since Vedic period. The Yajurveda mentions several instrumental choirs in the 19th and 20th mantras of the 30th scandal. Which makes the existence of music clear. The history of Indian music is at least 4000 years old. The most ancient music mentioned in the world is found in the Samaveda, the artistic atmosphere of various instruments and vocals developed here. Pythagoras became the first person in Europe to determine the place of vowels by the laws of mathematics. भारत में भी संगीत की समृद्ध परम्परा रही है। कुछ ही देशों में संगीत की इतनी पुरानी एवं समृद्ध परम्परा पायी गई है। भारतीय संगीत के प्रेरक षिव और सरस्वती है इसका तात्पर्य है कि मानव इतनी उच्च कला को बिना किसी दैवी प्रेरणा के, केवल स्वयं के बल पर विकसित नहीं कर सकता। वैदिककाल से ही संगीत भारत में विद्यमान था। यजुर्वेद में 30वें कांड के 19वें और 20वें मंत्र में कई वाद्य बजानेवालों का उल्लेख है। जिससे संगीत का अस्तित्व स्पष्ट होता है। भारतीय संगीत का इतिहास कम से कम 4000 वर्ष पुराना है। संसारभर में सबसे प्राचीन संगीत का उल्लेख सामवेद में मिलता है यहाँ विभिन्न प्रकार के वाद्य यंत्रों और स्वरों के कलात्मक वातावरण का विकास हुआ। यूरोप में पाइथागोरस पहला व्यक्ति हुआ है जिसमें गणित के नियमों द्वारा स्वरों के स्थान को निर्धारित किया।

The early hopes for the Seeger melograph, a device for recording the pitch and intensity of vocal performances, have not been realized because musicologists found the graphic traces of pitch and intensity too difficult to interpret. In this article, proposals are advanced for redesigning the melograph to provide researchers with more symbolically meaningful information. This involves abandoning the notion of fully separable parameters, relaxing the constraint that representations be culturally neutral, and developing ways to represent musical motion qua motion. The discussion is illustrated with redesigned melograms drawn from analyses of a particularly florid excerpt of South- Indian singing. Comparisons between the performances of a South-Indian singer and the performances of two of her students suggest ways in which cultural conditioning can affect vocal performance.

Las colecciones de música son cada vez mayores y más variadas, haciendo necesarias nuevas fórmulas para su organización automática. El análisis automático del ritmo tiene como fin la extracción de información rítmica de grabaciones musicales y es una de las principales áreas de investigación en la disciplina de recuperación de la información musical (MIR por sus siglas en inglés). La dimensión rítmica de la música es específica a una cultura y por tanto su análisis requiere métodos que incluyan el contexto cultural. Las complejidades rítmicas de la música clásica de la India, una de las mayores tradiciones musicales del mundo, no han sido tratadas hasta la fecha en MIR, motivo por el cual la elegimos como nuestro principal objeto de estudio. Nuestra intención es abordar cuestiones de análisis rítmico aún no tratadas en MIR con el fin de contribuir a la disciplina con nuevos métodos sensibles al contexto cultural y generalizables a otras tradiciones musicales. El objetivo de la tesis es el desarrollo de técnicas de procesamiento de señales y aprendizaje automático dirigidas por datos para el análisis, descripción y descubrimiento automáticos de estructuras y patrones rítmicos en colecciones de audio de música clásica de la India. Tras identificar retos y posibilidades, así como varias tareas de investigación relevantes para este objetivo, detallamos la elaboración del corpus de estudio y conjuntos de datos, fundamentales para métodos dirigidos por datos. A continuación, nos centramos en las tareas de análisis métrico y descubrimiento de patrones de percusión. El análisis métrico consiste en la alineación de eventos métricos a diferentes niveles con una grabación de audio. En la tesis formulamos las tareas de deducción de metro, seguimiento de metro y seguimiento informado de metro de acuerdo a la tradición estudiada, se evalúan diferentes modelos bayesianos capaces de incorporar explícitamente información de estructuras métricas de niveles superiores y se proponen nuevas extensiones. Los métodos propuestos superan las limitaciones de las propuestas existentes y los resultados indican la efectividad del análisis informado de metro. La percusión en la música clásica de la India utiliza onomatopeyas para la transmisión del repertorio y la técnica. Utilizamos estas sílabas para definir, representar y descubrir patrones en grabaciones de solos de percusión. A tal fin generamos una transcripción automática basada en un modelo oculto de Márkov, seguida de una búsqueda aproximada de subcadenas usando una biblioteca de patrones de percusión derivada de datos. Experimentos preliminares en patrones de percusión de ópera de Pekín, y en grabaciones de solos de tabla y mridangam, demuestran la utilidad de estas sílabas, identificando nuevos retos para el desarrollo de sistemas prácticos de descubrimiento. Las tecnologías resultantes de esta investigación son parte de un conjunto de herramientas desarrollado en el proyecto CompMusic para el mejor entendimiento y organización de la música clásica de la India, con el objetivo de proveer una experiencia mejorada de escucha y descubrimiento de música. Estos datos y herramientas pueden ser también relevantes para estudios musicológicos dirigidos por datos y otras tareas de MIR que puedan beneficiarse de análisis automáticos de ritmo.
Large and growing collections of a wide variety of music are now available on demand to music listeners, necessitating novel ways of automatically structuring these collections using different dimensions of music. Rhythm is one of the basic music dimensions and its automatic analysis, which aims to extract musically meaningful rhythm related information from music, is a core task in Music Information Research (MIR). Musical rhythm, similar to most musical dimensions, is culture-specific and hence its analysis requires culture-aware approaches. Indian art music is one of the major music traditions of the world and has complexities in rhythm that have not been addressed by the current state of the art in MIR, motivating us to choose it as the primary music tradition for study. Our intent is to address unexplored rhythm analysis problems in Indian art music to push the boundaries of the current MIR approaches by making them culture-aware and generalizable to other music traditions. The thesis aims to build data-driven signal processing and machine learning approaches for automatic analysis, description and discovery of rhythmic structures and patterns in audio music collections of Indian art music. After identifying challenges and opportunities, we present several relevant research tasks that open up the field of automatic rhythm analysis of Indian art music. Data-driven approaches require well curated data corpora for research and efforts towards creating such corpora and datasets are documented in detail. We then focus on the topics of meter analysis and percussion pattern discovery in Indian art music. Meter analysis aims to align several hierarchical metrical events with an audio recording. Meter analysis tasks such as meter inference, meter tracking and informed meter tracking are formulated for Indian art music. Different Bayesian models that can explicitly incorporate higher level metrical structure information are evaluated for the tasks and novel extensions are proposed. The proposed methods overcome the limitations of existing approaches and their performance indicate the effectiveness of informed meter analysis. Percussion in Indian art music uses onomatopoeic oral mnemonic syllables for the transmission of repertoire and technique, providing a language for percussion. We use these percussion syllables to define, represent and discover percussion patterns in audio recordings of percussion solos. We approach the problem of percussion pattern discovery using hidden Markov model based automatic transcription followed by an approximate string search using a data derived percussion pattern library. Preliminary experiments on Beijing opera percussion patterns, and on both tabla and mridangam solo recordings in Indian art music demonstrate the utility of percussion syllables, identifying further challenges to building practical discovery systems. The technologies resulting from the research in the thesis are a part of the complete set of tools being developed within the CompMusic project for a better understanding and organization of Indian art music, aimed at providing an enriched experience with listening and discovery of music. The data and tools should also be relevant for data-driven musicological studies and other MIR tasks that can benefit from automatic rhythm analysis.
Les col·leccions de música són cada vegada més grans i variades, fet que fa necessari buscar noves fórmules per a organitzar automàticament aquestes col·leccions. El ritme és una de les dimensions bàsiques de la música, i el seu anàlisi automàtic és una de les principals àrees d'investigació en la disciplina de l'recuperació de la informació musical (MIR, acrònim de la traducció a l'anglès). El ritme, com la majoria de les dimensions musicals, és específic per a cada cultura i per tant, el seu anàlisi requereix de mètodes que incloguin el context cultural. La complexitat rítmica de la música clàssica de l'Índia, una de les tradicions musicals més grans al món, no ha estat encara treballada en el camp d'investigació de MIR - motiu pel qual l'escollim com a principal material d'estudi. La nostra intenció és abordar les problemàtiques que presenta l'anàlisi rítmic de la música clàssica de l'Índia, encara no tractades en MIR, amb la finalitat de contribuir en la disciplina amb nous models sensibles al context cultural i generalitzables a altres tradicions musicals. L'objectiu de la tesi consisteix en desenvolupar tècniques de processament de senyal i d'aprenentatge automàtic per a l'anàlisi, descripció i descobriment automàtic d'estructures i patrons rítmics en col·leccions de música clàssica de l'Índia. Després d'identificar els reptes i les oportunitats, així com les diverses tasques d'investigació rellevants per a aquest objectiu, detallem el procés d'elaboració del corpus de dades, fonamentals per als mètodes basats en dades. A continuació, ens centrem en les tasques d'anàlisis mètric i descobriment de patrons de percussió. L'anàlisi mètric consisteix en alinear els diversos esdeveniments mètrics -a diferents nivells- que es produeixen en una gravació d'àudio. En aquesta tesi formulem les tasques de deducció, seguiment i seguiment informat de la mètrica. D'acord amb la tradició musical estudiada, s'avaluen diferents models bayesians que poden incorporar explícitament estructures mètriques d'alt nivell i es proposen noves extensions per al mètode. Els mètodes proposats superen les limitacions dels mètodes ja existents i el seu rendiment indica l'efectivitat dels mètodes informats d'anàlisis mètric. La percussió en la música clàssica de l'Índia utilitza onomatopeies per a la transmissió del repertori i de la tècnica, fet que construeix un llenguatge per a la percussió. Utilitzem aquestes síl·labes percussives per a definir, representar i descobrir patrons en enregistraments de solos de percussió. Enfoquem el problema del descobriment de patrons percussius amb un model de transcripció automàtica basat en models ocults de Markov, seguida d'una recerca aproximada de strings utilitzant una llibreria de patrons de percussions derivada de dades. Experiments preliminars amb patrons de percussió d'òpera de Pequín, i amb gravacions de solos de tabla i mridangam, demostren la utilitat de les síl·labes percussives. Identificant, així, nous horitzons per al desenvolupament de sistemes pràctics de descobriment. Les tecnologies resultants d'aquesta recerca són part de les eines desenvolupades dins el projecte de CompMusic, que té com a objectiu millorar l'experiència d'escoltar i descobrir música per a la millor comprensió i organització de la música clàssica de l'Índia, entre d'altres. Aquestes dades i eines poden ser rellevants per a estudis musicològics basats en dades i, també, altres tasques MIR poden beneficiar-se de l'anàlisi automàtic del ritme.

Traditional accounts of the transmission of compositions in Indian classical vocal music picture them being passed virtually unchanged from generation to generation. Comparison of the renditions of recent Gwalior gharana artists, however, shows that in reality extensive transformations can occur. In this study the transmission and performance of khyal compositions are examined with reference to the Gwalior tradition, taking into account both the views of gharana members and the evidence of recorded performances and notated compositions. Part 1 deals with the historical and theoretical background. It introduces the oral and written modes of transmission and explores Gwalior singers' attitudes to change. Such attitudes are illustrated with reference to V.N. Bhatkhande's celebrated Kramik pustak-malika collection and the controversy surrounding the 'authenticity' of its notations. In Part 2 the processes of transformation are examined in depth. The discussion centres on two comparative analyses. The first compares 24 versions of a single composition, 16 transcribed from performances, and 8 more derived from notated collections. Spanning the period from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century, these examples enable successive versions of the composition to be traced through various lines of transmission for up to three generations of Gwalior artists. The second analysis compares selected features of a large sample of notated compositions found in various published collections. Each of the main performance parameters - texts, rhythm and structure, and melody - is discussed in turn. A concluding chapter draws together the findings of the previous analyses.

Music analysis and source separation have become important and allied areas of research over the last decade. Towards this, analyzing a music signal for important events such as onsets, offsets and transients are important problems. These tasks help in music source separation and transcription. Approaches in source separation too have been making great strides, but most of these techniques are aimed at Western music and fail to perform well for Indian music. The fluid style of instrumentation in Indian music requires a slightly modified approach to analysis and source separation. We propose an onset detection algorithm that is motivated by the human auditory system. This algorithm has the advantage of having a unified framework for the detection of both onsets and offsets in music signals. This onset detection algorithm is further extended to detect percussive transients. Percussive transients have sharp onsets followed closely by sharp offsets. This characteristic is exploited in the percussive transients detection algorithm. This detection does not lend itself well to the extraction of transients and hence we propose an iterative algorithm to extract all types of transients from a polyphonic music signal. The proposed iterative algorithm is both fast and accurate to extract transients of various strengths. This problem of transient extraction can be extended to the problem of harmonic/percussion sound separation(HPSS), where a music signal is separated into two streams consisting of components mainly from percussion and harmonic instruments. Many algorithms that have been proposed till date deal with HPSS for Western music. But with Indian classical/film music, a different style of instrumentation or singing is seen, including high degree of vibratos or glissando content. This requires new approaches to HPSS. We propose extensions to two existing HPSS techniques, adapting them for Indian music. In both the extensions, we retain the original framework of the algorithm, showing that it is easy to incorporate the changes needed to handle Indian music. We also propose a new HPSS algorithm that is inspired by our transient extraction technique. This algorithm can be considered a generalized extension to our transient extraction algorithm and showcases our view that HPSS can be considered as an extension to transient analysis. Even the best HPSS techniques have leakages of harmonic components into percussion and this can lead to poor performances in tasks like rhythm analysis. In order to reduce this leakage, we propose a post processing technique on the percussion stream of the HPSS algorithm. The proposed method utilizes signal stitching by exploiting a commonly used model for percussive envelopes. We also developed a vocals extraction algorithm from the harmonic stream of the HPSS algorithm. The vocals extraction follows the popular paradigm of extracting the predominant pitch followed by generation of the vocals signal corresponding to the pitch. We show that HPSS as a pre-processing technique gives an advantage in reducing the interference from percussive sources in the extraction stage. It is also shown that the performance of vocal extraction algorithms improve with the knowledge about locations of the vocal segments. This is shown with the help of an oracle to locate the vocal segments. The use of the oracle greatly reduces the interferences from other dominating sources in the extracted vocals signal.

This chapter introduces a scena composed by Naresh Sohal, which is based on the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore. This piece exerts a powerful appeal, with its arresting blend of Eastern and Western idioms. The vocal writing is clearly influenced by Indian music, and this means that the full vibrato of much Western singing should be kept firmly in check. Maintaining a forward-placed, clear tone on sustained low notes requires control. In general, vocal lines lie very well. The overall mood is gentle, and the pacing steady, apart from sudden outbursts of passion. In stark contrast to most of the vocal lines, these instances call for an exaggerated vibrato.

Chapter 3 moves to the other end of the sonic and acoustic spectrum through a close listening to two well-known tracks from the group, Asian Dub Foundation (ADF). This group has been at the forefront of sampling as a decolonizing musico-cultural practice for some decades. Their music making, and how they deploy the full repertoire of sampling techniques, draw on the Club/DJ cultures of the 1990s on the one hand and, on the other, Jamaican Reggae and Dub, musicalities that played a formative role in the emergence of Rap and Hip-Hop (Chapter 6). ADF made their mark as part of the “Asian Underground” generation of British Asian musicians. Their sampling practices straddle classical Indian music, “Bollywood” soundtracks, Rap vocals, Reggae rhythms, and Dub bass lines for tracks that are not only danceable but also explicitly political, in ways that go beyond the lyrics. ADF’s collaborative, and technologically mediated “crossover” compositions decolonize Western pop music idioms as their musicking evokes contemporary and historical narratives of social injustice and racism, in the UK and around the world.