Sudha Achieves 6 Sigma

mahesh3 · Post by **mahesh3** » 22 Jan 2009, 06:03

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ms781nbpzX0&NR=1

VK RAMAN · Post by **VK RAMAN** » 22 Jan 2009, 07:08

To reach the divine stage in carnatic - Paradigm shift in thought process - Six Sigma!

DhwaniB · Post by **DhwaniB** » 23 Jan 2009, 16:23

I got a chance to browse thro Sudha Ragunathan's site and did read the article by the Harvard Professor. Having gone thro such initiations myself at work, I think it was a worthwhile analogy and comparison and the elements that he has so lucidly spelt out deserves a lot of merit. Yes, a shift in the thought and assessment process indeed!

I have not really come across such a study for any aspect of carnatic music - friends please enlighten if there has been something similiar done elsewhere or for any other artist. It only shows there is a lot more that goes into the making than what we see and hear on stage....

coolkarni · Post by **coolkarni** » 23 Jan 2009, 21:12

dhanyasi · Post by **dhanyasi** » 24 Jan 2009, 20:13

Is Prof V.Sivakumar from Harvard University or Howard University? The former is in Cambridge MA and the latter in Washington DC and they are two very different learning institutions.

ragam-talam · Post by **ragam-talam** » 24 Jan 2009, 20:58

dhanyasi wrote:Is Prof V.Sivakumar from Harvard University or Howard University?

http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/fr/2006/0 ... 890600.htm

mahesh3 · Post by **mahesh3** » 24 Jan 2009, 21:04

i've heard parallels drawn between music and movies, healing, cricket, tennis any other rubbish tamasha that took anyone's fancy at a particular moment and now this...operational efficiency, management principles and know-how blah blah blah.

Dont know if any of it would have made a difference to Thyagaraja..but it sure helps keep our artists happy...

coolkarni · Post by **coolkarni** » 24 Jan 2009, 21:06

dhanyasi · Post by **dhanyasi** » 24 Jan 2009, 21:12

Exactly my point.... just because it appeared in Hindu it might not be correct.. When I searched Harvard Business School faculty there is no one by the name Sivakumar. His email address stated in the article belongs to Howard university which is in Washington, which is where the Professor is said to be.

I want to emphasize that this has no bearing on the article itself....

coolkarni · Post by **coolkarni** » 24 Jan 2009, 21:16

mri_fan · Post by **mri_fan** » 25 Jan 2009, 00:28

I know Prof Sivakumar, and he lives in the Washington DC area. He is the uncle of Smt Sandya Srinath, one of the top violinists in the US. He is a professor at Howard, not Harvard.

vainika · Post by **vainika** » 25 Jan 2009, 11:23

Also see
http://www.sudharagunathan.com/analytics.htm

arasi · Post by **arasi** » 25 Jan 2009, 11:48

Thank you Ramki.
Another angle to CM--a scholastic analysis on the marketing aspect of our music, to suit today's demand for music. Consumer satisfaction and 'composer' satisfaction too. Makes me happy that I don't have to wait until a centenary celebration to hear the great ones voicing my songs! Of course we know that Sudha is a vast repository of songs old and new...

makham · Post by **makham** » 25 Jan 2009, 12:04

Statistics has traditionally been the target of cynics. Meaningless exercises as the one referred here will only strengthen the cynicism. Six sigma is nothing more than a slogan to exhort people to achieve quality. It has been WRONGLY equated to committing only 3.4 defects per million occasions. It ACTUALLY works out to committing only 2 defects per Billion occasions. If you talk to the insiders at Motorola and GE they will agree with this.

The essay in this case is anecdotal - what is the random variable whose consistency or otherwise is measured here? - is it no. of apaswarams / hour , is it # of occasions of missing the eduppu in talam?

As Coolji has hinted, non-deviation in the music rendering process runs counter to manodharma.
I would love artistes who are at 0.5 sigma level.

The whole topic is ill-directed, perhaps for some cheap publicity from gullible people

coolkarni · Post by **coolkarni** » 25 Jan 2009, 12:07

vainika · Post by **vainika** » 25 Jan 2009, 12:58

makham wrote: The essay in this case is anecdotal - what is the random variable whose consistency or otherwise is measured here?

As the learned professor mentions having attended 30+ concerts, allegedly the minimum number to draw such conclusions, one may reasonably conclude that he invoked the Central Limit Theorem (Cutcheri Likeability Theorem?) to conduct parametric hypothesis tests with the concert as the unit of analysis.

Further, one may speculate that he used such variables as

Feeling of satisfaction: measured in duration and volume of handclaps (units -> sec and dB, respectively)
Familiarity: # of collective gasps of pleasurable recognition when singer launched into the rasikas' favorite song (units -> AhA)
Team playership: # of appreciative nods and flashy smiles given by main artist to the pakkavAdyamists (units -> shAbAsh)
Consistency: inverse of inter-concert variability of time-into-concert when one heard the maximum AhAs or kaithaTTals ( units -> 1/sec^2)
Cash flow: (ticketprice * # tickets) summed across price categories (units -> INR, $, kroner, etc.)

Co-rasikas are invited to suggest additional variables or refine the proposed ones...

srkris · Post by **srkris** » 25 Jan 2009, 16:42

I wonder who will be the first ISO certified carnatic singer.

vidya · Post by **vidya** » 25 Jan 2009, 19:28

vainika wrote: Co-rasikas are invited to suggest additional variables or refine the proposed ones...

I walked right into that one, Didn't I? Here is a CMBA glossary. Vainika gets partial credit for ROI

Disclaimer : No offence meant to anyone, purely in jest.

AR - Applause Receivable

AR = (Loudness + Tara stayi sancaras + speed + popularity) * No of people in the audience
A complex ratio involving loudness, crescendo and other factors

AP - Applause Possible

A measure of the number of people in the audience.

ROI - Revenge of the Instrumentalist

A measure of the ratio of the applause receievable of the vocalist to that of the violinist.
ROI = AR(V)/AR(I)

ROE - Return on edams

A measure of successful returns to edams when singing Kanakkus.

CRM - Crooning Raga Methodology

A specific methodology used for improving audience response and audience targetting.

KPI - Key Pathantharam Indicators.

An identifiable measure of the impact and influence of the traceable banis of gurus that appear in the music of a musicians ie those whose primary sources of learning do not include audio tapes and CDs.

CIP - Commonly inflicted Pallavis

A term collectively used to refer to pallavis an artiste renders over a period of time.

BEP - Brigha effectiveness point

A measure of the flexibility of voice involving Fixed Brighas and Variable Brghas and the point where the voice breaks.

DhwaniB · Post by **DhwaniB** » 25 Jan 2009, 19:43

Well, well...while there is merit in analyzing the 'analytics' , lets also give some credit to the thought process. Someone at least thought of a qualitative measure and there is no harm in cross pollination of thought processes. There has to certainly be different ways of measurement and to take a lead from vainika, followed by vidya, whatever acronyms have been put up in good humour could also be the precursor to probably an actual study across musicians using these yardsticks!

=D You never know what the study may throw up...

coolkarni · Post by **coolkarni** » 25 Jan 2009, 20:44

uday_shankar · Post by **uday_shankar** » 25 Jan 2009, 21:11

coolkarni wrote: But to use a Statistical Tool to describe such a fuzzy thing like Classical Music Appreciation or even gilding a Lily like Tyagaraja....That is what gets my Phew !!Hey Ram !!

Indeed! This could be one of the craziest, surreal moments in CM

.

The closest parallel that comes to mind (only vaguely, others can fill in the details if they remember) is from a scene in the movie "Dead poet's society". There's one scene of a poetry class taught by someone other than the Robin Williams character, for some reason. The instructor draws some graph on the black board on how to mathematically analyze the value of a poem and so on. Little might have one imagined that that crazy parody might find a "serious" parallel in real life someday. I swear I'm certainly not interested in taking any class under Prof. Sivakumar

.

arasi · Post by **arasi** » 25 Jan 2009, 21:13

Vidya,
Enjoyed your post for the humor (we mostly read your scholarly posts on the forum).

vainika · Post by **vainika** » 26 Jan 2009, 00:33

I agree with DhwaniB that a rigorous statistical study of concerts may be interesting. Uday and Cool-ji, statistics is an established tool of literary analysis, including both prose and poetry.

Some examples with one abstract given below...

Ayata, KH (2006) Statistical Prosody: Rhyming Pattern Selection in Japanese Short Poetry
Forms: 21: 259-273. http://www.scipress.org/journals/forma/ ... 030259.pdf

Takeda et al (2000) Discovering Similar Poems from Anthologies of Classical Japanese Poems. Proceedings of the Institute of Statistical Mathematics Vol.48, No.2, 271-287. http://www.ism.ac.jp/editsec/toukei/abstract/48-2e.html

Potter (1991) Statistical analysis of literature: A retrospective on Computers and the Humanities, 1966-1990. Journal of Computers and the Humanities. Volume 25, Number 6: 401-429

Kohonen et al. (200?) In search for Volta: Statistical Analysis of word patterns in Shakespeare's sonnets. Helsinki Univ Technology pre-print. www.cis.hut.fi/okohonen/papers/InSearch ... aFinal.pdf

The sonnet is one of the most canonical modes of poetry in Western literature. The English or Shakespearean sonnet falls in to three quatrains in iambic pentameter, with a turn at the end of the line 12 and a concluding couplet often of a summary or epigrammatic character. The turn normally is both semantic and stylistic for the rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef of the first part of the poem changes to a form gg in the closing couplet. We analyze if the semantic turn, or volta, can be found with statistical analysis of word distributions, using the Self-Organizing Map for exploration and visualization. The Self-Organizing Map is a neural network architecture based on unsupervised learning. We conclude that our methods can be useful for finding semantic and stylistic turns that can then be studied in detail using other methods. We propose extensions to our
methods for other literary analysis.

vidya · Post by **vidya** » 26 Jan 2009, 01:10

vainika wrote:I agree with DhwaniB that a rigorous statistical study of concerts may be interesting.

Statistical study of concerts (over time periods) patterns , ragas has been done in the past though not necessarily that of a single performer.

1.Those interested may check this rather old article. One hundred years of music in Madras - By Kathleen L'Armand and Adrian L'Armand2.Prof.T.Viswa's Ph.D. Thesis Analysis of Raga alapana also uses some basic statistical analysis incl frequency of phrases, alapana patterns, syllable distributions across various performers - He has used TMT, KVN etc as a sample set.

coolkarni · Post by **coolkarni** » 26 Jan 2009, 10:18

uday_shankar · Post by **uday_shankar** » 26 Jan 2009, 10:36

vainika wrote:IUday and Cool-ji, statistics is an established tool of literary analysis, including both prose and poetry.

Fair enough. The real problem is not that analysis was done but that it may drive preferences

. Nothing wrong with that either, just that it feels odd that people may use statistical tools to help determine if they are in love with something/someone! For myself, I am glad to restrict the use of statistical tools to data analysis. But more power to anybody who wants to use ANOVA to...help find a worthy date/mate.

vainika · Post by **vainika** » 26 Jan 2009, 13:30

But Uday, everything is data. Even horoscopes compiled by your friendly neighborhood astrologer, and contents of the IT_brides.com or greencardgrooms.com websites. And, for that matter, even invective used on this forum

From what I can gather, we have examples of the following studies with quantitative (not limited to statistical) approaches already in Indian classical music.

i. Analysis of pitches in the context of the 12-discernable vs. 22 shruti debate
ii. Studies of rAgas, in terms of frequency distribution of phrases, syllables, and svaras used
iii. Comparisons among singers with respect to the above
iv. Trends in concert # and type.

Studies of audience receptivity/response are probably not far away, and as long as they are not conducted with a bias towards influencing the market one way or other, should make for interesting analysis.

'Jes saying we should probably not throw out the baby (stats/quantitative analyses in general) with the bathwater (b-school jargon thrown around to lend an air of objectivity to individual impressions).

vganesh · Post by **vganesh** » 28 Jan 2009, 15:47

In music where so much of NiRaval/MaNo Dharmam plays a role, how you find out DPM(Defects per Million). I was given to understanding that Six Sigma applies generally to a mechanically repeated process. Hmm.. Great going and new ways of defining singing as a quantitative analysis subject.

kedharam · Post by **kedharam** » 31 Jan 2009, 03:21

"Art is destroyed by the very perfection of craftsmanship as the vital rhythm of a curve is lost in the geometrical symmetry of the circle" - The GNB

So much for applying 6 Sigma to analyze performing arts...