Automatic genre classification of North Indian devotional music

The automatic classification of musical genre from audio signals has been a topic of active research in recent years. Although the identification of genre is a subjective task that likely involves high-level musical attributes such as instrumentation, style, rhythm and melody, low-level acoustic features have been widely applied to the automatic task with varying degrees of success. In this work, we consider the genres of the music of northern India, in particular the devotional music sub-genres of bhajan and qawwali. Both are rooted in the framework of North Indian classical music and are similar in the sense of serving the identical socio-cultural function even if for different religious communities of the same region. Features representing timbre, as well as temporal characteristics in the form of tempo and modulation spectra of timbral features, are shown to be potentially effective discriminators as seen by classification experiments performed on a database of excerpts drawn from the two music genres.