Discrimination of melodic patterns in indian classical music

The melodic phrases of a raga are an important cue to its identity. Artists, however, incorporate considerable creative variation within a raga phrase during performance while still preserving its identity in the ears of the listeners. It is of interest therefore to explore the boundaries of this categorization of phrase identity, given the space of musical variations in the tonal interval and duration dimensions. Such an endeavor can help better model musical similarity for music retrieval and pedagogy applications. In this work, we carry out melodic shape manipulations on a selected prominent phrase of raga Deshkar to study the subjective responses of musicians in comparison with non-musicians in terms of perceived discrimination of the controlled variations. A method is presented for deriving musically consistent synthetic stimuli for listening. Subjective responses on the discrimination and identification tasks are presented along with a discussion on possible perceptual mechanisms at play.