Dynamics of Melodic Discourse in Indian Music

Abstract

3 Van der Meer is writing specifically about ālāp in the dhrupad vocal style, but the comments quoted apply equally to instrumental performances of the kind to be analysed here. 5 Dates from Parikh 2007. According to information given on his website, Budhaditya Mukherjee learned sitar from his father, Bimalendu Mukherjee (1925-?), who studied with Imdad Khan's son Inayat Hussein Khan (1894-1938), father of the worldfamous sitarists Vilayat and Imrat Khan, and with three of Inayat's senior disciples. Bimalendu also studied with a number of instrumental and vocal teachers from other traditions. See http://www.budhaditya.com/. 6 I am perhaps rather artificially imagining a listener who has not read the CD liner notes, written by myself, which briefly prefigure some of the content of this study.

Structural Segmentation of Alap in Dhrupad Vocal Concerts

“…The above musical cues were found to be effectively captured with acoustic features related to syllable rate and vocal brightness, both computable from the short-time magnitude spectrum representation of the audio recording. Thus, our work provides us with explicit descriptions about the audible structure of the alap, an important constituent of the listener's unconscious schematic expectations (Widdess, 2011). With the given training dataset, a supervised classifier trained on the hand-crafted features performed best overall.…”

Structure and Proportion in Hindustani Ālāp

“…A broader aim is to extend the fine work done on continuity and grammar of performance by Slawek (1998) and Magriel (1997), work on metered time in Hindustani performance, Widdess's (2011) development of "contour schema" understanding in ālāp performance, and Blume's (2003) discussion of underlying temporal relationships between phrases in ālāp, by noting the latter's summary statement, "proportion of musical time . .…”