On EU initiative, IIT Madras team working on music software

Chennai: As part of the European Union’s global initiative to digitalise techniques of music across the world, IIT Madras has been asked to come up with software and research material on Carnatic music.

The department of computer science and engineering is into such research, and is developing software for tone determination, raga verification, and also to process strokes of the mridangam and other similar percussion instruments.

Professor Hema Murthy, department of computer science and engineering said that there is a college known as UPF (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) where they decided to archive old music.

“They have asked IIT Bombay to come up with similar research on Hindustani classical music as well as IIT Madras on Carnatic music. So we developed software which will determine the tone, then raga verification, and stroke on percussion instruments,” she said.

Explaining raga verification, Jom Kuriakose, an M.S student from the computer science and engineering department, described that a computer can listen to a song and verify its raga. Explaining the tone determination during Carnatic concerts one can easily determine the swaras – sa and pa because these are fixed swaras. The bandwidths of frequencies for these notes are sharper.

“So the group experimenting on this aspect used signal processing and machine learning techniques to find out which are sharper notes,” he said.

A similar method is followed for percussion instruments. Kuriakose said that the research was started three years ago and is still going on.