Melodic transcription

Efforts to automatically transcribe melodies in Carnatic and Hindustani music have been done [RPS17, RSPS19, VPMA20]. These approaches show versatile strategies to obtain a descriptive notation for Indian Art Music melodies. These notations are typically reversible and may be used for further research on the performances.

State Based Transcription (SBT) for Carnatic Music

Note

The installation instructions, details of the API and data formats, are available here.

The SBT tool extracts the descriptive transcription of a pitch curve of an audio excerpt. The excerpt is typically a segment of a Carnatic rendition. The SBT also needs the excerpt’s tonic and its raga as inputs. The descriptive transcription is obtained according to the algorithm described in [VPMA20], in accordance with the raga’s gamaka movements. This output is compact, and is provided as a csv file.

You can interpolate this descriptive transcription to obtain a pitch curve, which is synthesizable. The synthesis quality is insensitive to the interpolation scheme – linear interpolation is handy to start with. But, do check this web resource if you plan to use pitch bend in MIDI.

Tip

SBT works better for cleaner recordings, preferably with only a tambura accompaniment.