Kaustuv Kanti Ganguli

• Doctor of Philosophy
• PostDoc Position at New York University Abu Dhabi

An interesting aspect of Indian art music is the prominent place of improvisation in performance. We explore the influence of the structural constraints of the genre on raga motifs in the course of improvisation. Audio recordings of North Indian vocal concerts are analysed to extract measurements of the defining parameters of the recurrent melodic...

A prominent aspect of the notion of musical similarity across the music of various cultures is related to the local matching of melodic motifs. This holds for Indian art music, a highly structured form with raga playing a critical role in the melodic organization. Apart from the tonal material, a raga is characterized by a set of melodic phrases th...

Raga grammar provides a theoretical framework that supports creativity and flexibility in improvisation while carefully maintaining the distinctiveness of each raga in the ears of a listener. A computational model for raga grammar can serve as a powerful tool to characterize grammaticality in performance. Like in other forms of tonal music, a distr...

This article provides insights into aspects of tempo and rhythmic elaboration in Hindustani music, based on a study of a large corpus of recorded performances. Typical tempo developments and stress patterns within a metrical cycle are computed, which we refer to as tempo and rhythm patterns, respectively. Rhythm patterns are obtained by aggregating...

Time-series pattern matching methods that incorporate time warping have recently been used with varying degrees of success on tasks of search and discovery of melodic phrases from audio for Indian classical vocal music. While these methods perform effectively due to the minimal assumptions they place on the nature of the sampled pitch temporal traj...

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 o...

Ragas are characterized by their melodic motifs or catch phrases that constitute strong cues to the raga identity for both the performer and the listener, and therefore are of great interest in music retrieval and automatic transcription. While the characteristic phrases, or pakads, appear in written notation as a sequence of notes, musicological r...