A study on artist similarity using projection pursuit and MFCC: Identification of Gharana from raga performance

Indian classical music resulted from the fusion of various cultural styles especially folk music in the country. Ragas which form the nucleus of Indian classical music are traditionally been divided into various thaats according to scale. Although every raga has a characteristic mood of its own, differences occur between renditions of the same raga based on the school or personal style of the artist. This latitude given to artists while making Indian classical music rich also makes it more difficult to analyze from a scientific perspective. This paper discusses the use of projection pursuit techniques along with MFCC to analyze the similarity between different artists, thereby providing a means to classify the raga performance objectively rather than perceptually. The difference between the objective and perceptual signatures of an artist has been argued as analogous to the difference between fingerprint and character traits of an individual for the purpose of classification.