When
Thematic Session 3: Modeling and Analysis (Tuesday, 09:40)
Abstract
My presentation will deal with a short summary of computational embodiment studies in North indian classical music (NICM). Musicological scholarship in NICM has dealt with the study and analysis of co-musical gesture, which forms a critical feature of the improvisational songform. Studies have focussed on the performative (Clayton 2005, 2019), semiotic (Rahaim 2013), as well as pedagogical aspects (Pearson 2013) of the artform. Modeling studies in these can also focus rather on the analytical rather than generative aspects, even if artificial intelligence is involved. NICM presents a unique problem where non-quantization of notes, and the predominant characteristic use of pitch contours to express sonic differentiation means that quantized modeling of, for example, sheet based music goes only so far in this regard.
The engagement of musical AI in NICM in for example MIR also primarily deals with the modeling of pitch positions and placement, dealing with issues of machine listening such as Raga identification, analysis by synethesis, tempo and beat detection and analysis and so on. These models so far are still too fresh to be used in a meaningful generative manner.
My own work earlier has dealt with trying to understand if the projected representational forms of these gestures, or gesture traces - can be used to model NICM performances, or small musical phrases through AI. Phrase generation models in this way can look a lot more like sketch or drawing based neural networks rather than piano roll modeling.
Embodiment and studies of musical embodiment can be of huge value to trying to build phrase generation models in NICM. I will present an overview of the status of knowledge in the intersection of these fields, as well as review of performance computational scale of recent generative AI architectures in sketch modeling, and their possible applications in this area.
Clayton, M., Sager, R., & Will, U. (2005, January). In time with the music: the concept of entrainment and its significance for ethnomusicology. In European meetings in ethnomusicology. (Vol. 11, pp. 1-82). Romanian Society for Ethnomusicology.
Rahaim, M. (2013). Musicking bodies: Gesture and voice in Hindustani music. Wesleyan University Press.
Pearson, L. (2013). Gesture and the sonic event in Karnatak music. Empirical musicology review., 8(1), 2-14.
Clayton, M., Jakubowski, K., & Eerola, T. (2019). Interpersonal entrainment in Indian instrumental music performance: Synchronization and movement coordination relate to tempo, dynamics, metrical and cadential structure. Musicae Scientiae, 23(3), 304-331.
Bio
Tejaswinee Kelkar is a music technologist, teacher and vocalist. She holds an associate professor ii position at the University of Oslo, where she teaches in the Music, Communication and Technology masters program. She works as a data analyst at Universal Music Norway, working with programming tools for business intelligence for Norway and reporting solutions for other territories. She finished her PhD with the RITMO center of excellence at University of Oslo in November 2019. Her research interests are melodic cognition, motion-capture and musical-cultural analysis. Her research focus is on how aspects of melodic perception are illustrated through multimodality, and linguistic prosody. Previously, she worked in the creation and development of an online virtual lab for teaching concepts of north indian music through the use of web audio, developing pedagogical tools and exercises for the web with the VLabs project. Her masters thesis was about gesturing and body movement in NICM, and clustering based spatial algorithms for raga display. As a musician, she focuses on integrating her musical background with electronic involvement at every stage from composing new material to developing actuated materials to amplify a disembodied voice. She is interested in understanding the use of the voice as a disembodied, and distorted object. She trained in north indian classical singing from a young age, and later, western classical composition. In addition to being a vocalist, she plays the harmonium and other instruments.