Imitate or recall : how do musicians perform raga phrases ?

A raga performance in Hindustani vocal music builds upon a melodic framework wherein ragacharacteristic phrases are presented with creative variations while strongly retaining their identity. It is therefore of interest, for both music information retrieval and pedagogy, to understand better the space of “allowed” variations of the melodic motifs. Our recent study of melodic shapes corresponding to a selected raga phrase showed that variations in the temporal extent of a passing note within a characteristic phrase was perceived categorically by trained musicians. In this work, we investigate the same phenomenon via a different paradigm ‘listen and imitate’ wherein the results are achieved in a more natural situation for the subjects. The results demonstrate that trained musicians perform a memory abstraction of the ragacharacteristic phrases and are deaf to small acoustic differences when instructed to imitate. The analyses also provides insights into the relative importance of the constituent svaras in a phrase in the raga context. KeywordsRaga-characteristic phrase, Listen and Imitate, Categorical Perception (CP).