Reflections about the forum trends

[gopalkoduri]

We are a group of researchers working on the development of computational tools to process audio and text music data. We work at the Music Technology Group of the Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona, Spain) within the CompMusic project (http://compmusic.upf.edu).

We are now trying to extract meaningful semantic relations between Carnatic music concepts by analyzing web data. We have done some initial experiments using rasikas.org that we would like to share with you all and we would also appreciate some feedback on the results.

We crawled the forum in an anonymous (no user info was included, only the content was processed) and a respectful way (slowly, without overloading the server, and crawling only in sleeping time in India). Then, we applied some text mining methods to find the relations between different music specific terms, such as raagas, taalas, performers, composers and instruments.

Here we highlight some of the results. As expert listeners of Carnatic music, we think that you can confirm if they make sense or not...

1) The most frequent terms in rasikas.org.

Top-5 Raagas:
kalyani: 494
bhairavi: 362
ragamalika: 342
kannada: 317
nata: 309

Top-5 Taalas:
adi: 2413
rupakam: 459
chapu: 251
misram: 126
misra chapu: 119

Top-5 Composers:
tyagaraja: 488
purandara dasa: 150
papanasam sivan: 111
annamacharya: 105
muthuswami dikshitar: 49

2). Music terms that are mentioned closely together in forum posts.

RAAGA - RAAGA:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/vie ... c6MQ#gid=0

(For example, regarding the pair {yagapriya, kalavati} we found an interesting discussion in the following thread http://www.rasikas.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=14435.)

RAAGA - PERFORMER:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/vie ... E6MQ#gid=0

We would really appreciate if you could have a look at them and answer whether they make sense or not, and (optionally) describe why they do or don't make sense.

Your input is more than appreciated. One of our goals is to make the Carnatic music tradition better known in music research. We will share all our results and methodology openly, and especially with the rasikas.org community.

With all our best regards,
....


P.S: You can find some basic statistics of the forum here - http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/83 ... nthly.png/ and http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/85 ... nthly.png/ .

[keerthi]

Hi,

Have you taken any measures to disambiguate the rAga kannada from the eponymous language..? Also for nata, have you account for variants in the spelling..?

Looking forward to learn more about your methodology..

[mahesh3]

-

[VK RAMAN]

Are these raagas taken from the kutcheries or from the request for sahityas and bhajans?

[gopalkoduri]

Hi,

Have you taken any measures to disambiguate the rAga kannada from the eponymous language..? Also for nata, have you account for variants in the spelling..?

Looking forward to learn more about your methodology..

Hi Keerthi,

Right now, we have not used any word sense disambiguation measures. It is in our (due) work plan. But we did use a couple of string matching algorithms to find different variations in the spellings. Eg: Nattai, Natta, Nata will be deemed to be the same word by the algorithm. Further, we are manually checking the output to correct any misclassified word.

Soon, we will be done with the report on our methodology, and will be glad to share it with you.

[gopalkoduri]

Are these raagas taken from the kutcheries or from the request for sahityas and bhajans?

At the moment, we considered them both together to understand the overall trends of the forum. Do you think it would be more meaningful if we do a separate analysis of both? If it is the case, can you please elaborate? It can help us tune our methodology appropriately.

Thanks!

[msakella]

Dear brother-member, gopalkoduri, I feel very happy to know that you and your team are working nobly to standardise various things relating to our Karnataka music. In this respect you have also furnished some data. I have gone through that data and have some doubts to be ably cleared by you.

To tell the fact, in the guise of maintaining the tradition, the conservatives of our music have never allowed the standardising of certain aspects of our music. By this, very sadly, we have already lost many invaluable things and many unwanted and most harmful things have crept into our music. I sincerely feel, even now, we must look into all such things and do the needful not only in making the things easier and authentic to our aspirants but also to preserve them for the posterity.

In particular, I have worked for four decades on a particular branch of Tala which is called Prastara and wrote three authentic and original books of their own kind in the annals of our music literature. This particular topic has never been brought into light by any author of any language or century. Accordingly, some authentic serial numbers are already available to our Talas and thus Adi’s serial-number is ‘41’, Rupakam’s name is ‘Patti’ and the serial-number is “3’ and Triputa’s name is “Shankha’ and the serial-number is 321. If the ‘misram and misrachapu’ are properly defined clearly I shall furnish their serial-numbers also. But, in this respect, I want to know on what basis the serial-numbers you have furnished are arrived at to these Talas. I also want to know on what basis the numbers for the Ragas, composers etc., are also furnished in your post. amsharma

[VK RAMAN]

At the moment, we considered them both together to understand the overall trends of the forum. Do you think it would be more meaningful if we do a separate analysis of both? If it is the case, can you please elaborate? It can help us tune our methodology appropriately.

Thanks!

Rasikas requesting for sahitya might not have used to sing for themselves or used for singing in a kutchery. Most of the collector's of sahitya might be learners or teachers. So kutcheries reflect the actual use of raagas IMHO. Focus on your research and do not allow it to be derailed by questions that keep prolonging

[gopalkoduri]

Dear brother-member, gopalkoduri, I feel very happy to know that you and your team are working nobly to standardise various things relating to our Karnataka music. In this respect you have also furnished some data. I have gone through that data and have some doubts to be ably cleared by you.

To tell the fact, in the guise of maintaining the tradition, the conservatives of our music have never allowed the standardising of certain aspects of our music. By this, very sadly, we have already lost many invaluable things and many unwanted and most harmful things have crept into our music. I sincerely feel, even now, we must look into all such things and do the needful not only in making the things easier and authentic to our aspirants but also to preserve them for the posterity.

In particular, I have worked for four decades on a particular branch of Tala which is called Prastara and wrote three authentic and original books of their own kind in the annals of our music literature. This particular topic has never been brought into light by any author of any language or century. Accordingly, some authentic serial numbers are already available to our Talas and thus Adi’s serial-number is ‘41’, Rupakam’s name is ‘Patti’ and the serial-number is “3’ and Triputa’s name is “Shankha’ and the serial-number is 321. If the ‘misram and misrachapu’ are properly defined clearly I shall furnish their serial-numbers also. But, in this respect, I want to know on what basis the serial-numbers you have furnished are arrived at to these Talas. I also want to know on what basis the numbers for the Ragas, composers etc., are also furnished in your post. amsharma

Akella garu,

Please kindly note that the numbers reported correspond to their frequencies (number of time they occured in the forum). They are in no way related to the serial numbers that you have mentioned.

పెద్దవారు, అనుభవం ఉన్నవారు కనుక మీకు ఈ సంగీతం గురించి, ప్రామాణికాల గురించి మాట్లాడటం చెల్లుతుంది. ఐతే, మా పరిశోధనలో అటువంటి ప్రామాణికాల జోలికి వెళ్ళే పని ఉండదు. అందరి అమోదం (ముఖ్యంగా నేటి సంగీతకారులు, పరిశోధకులు) ఉన్న ప్రాంగణంలోనే మా ఆటలన్నీ. అయితే మీరన్నది సత్యం, కర్ణాటక సంగీతంలో శాస్తీయంగా కొంత పరిశోధన జరిగినప్పటికీ, ఇంకా చాలా జరగాల్సి ఉంది.

వీలు చూస్కుని మొదటి పోస్ట్లో ఉన్న సర్వేలో పాల్గొనగలరు.

Thanks!

[gopalkoduri]

Rasikas requesting for sahitya might not have used to sing for themselves or used for singing in a kutchery. Most of the collector's of sahitya might be learners or teachers. So kutcheries reflect the actual use of raagas IMHO. Focus on your research and do not allow it to be derailed by questions that keep prolonging

Thanks Raman. Will periodically post the results of our analysis in this forum. An active participation from the members is always appreciated

[msakella]

ఛాలా సంతొషం గోపాల్ గారు, మీ కృషి సత్ఫలితాలనీయాలని ఆశిస్తున్నాను. వీలువెంబడిని, అవసరానిబట్టి మీ కృషిలొ తప్పక పాలుపంచుకుంటాను. భవదీయుదు. msakella
Gopalji, Very glad. I wish you all the best. As per my convenience I shall certainly join with you later if needed. Yours, msakella.

[vasanthakokilam]

Wait a second, it is usually Tamilians who can not contain themselves from posting in Tamil script in this forum

As usual, we request posting the transliteration and wherever possible the translation. Given the general interest in this case, definitely translation please.

Thanks.

[Lakshman]

Gopalkoduri: Please look at the analysis I did some time ago. The results are here:
http://www.karnatik.com/popularragas.shtml

[vasanthakokilam]

The paper Gopala K. Koduri and colleagues wrote on this topic. Thanks Lahshman for spotting this.

http://www.mtg.upf.edu/system/files/pub ... ir2102.pdf

[cacm]

LATE PROF. BILL SKELTON RECORDED& ANALYSED EVERY SONG IN EVERY CONCERT IN ONE YEAR IN THE SIXTIES. EXCELLENT ANALYSIS; MAY BE AVAILABLE IN HIS ARCHIIVES-AT HAMILTON COLLEGE NEAR SYRACUSE?- MAY BE INTERESTING TO COMPARE WITH YOUR RESULTS. GOOD LUCK. VKV :ymapplause:

[vasanthakokilam]

Thanks VKV. I vaguely recall us discussing that analysis in this forum a few years back. Let us look for that thread.

There are a lot of articles on Bill Skelton on the web. Here is one with his picture playing Nadaswaram: http://www.thehindu.com/features/friday ... e24685.ece and recollections by Ms. Geetha Ramanathan Bennett

He was so very much into India, he had requested a memorial service for him on the banks of the river Kaveri near Srirangam.

[mahavishnu]

VK and cacm: Thank you for your links.
Using network analyses on semantic content appears to be a very good tool for this kind of endeavor.