Understanding melodic transitions: A neuro-acoustical study with Indian Classical Music

Different kinds of melodic movements and note-to-note transitions form one of the most important features of music. In this work, we have tried to analyze some of these transitions, within the domain of Instrumental Indian Classical Music. Two most widely used transitions in ICM renditions have been chosen for this pilot study- i). slow, gliding transitions, ii). fast, direct-note transitions Three pairs of melodic portions have been prepared from recorded Sitar renditions of Indian maestros, such that within each pair, one clips was predominantly characterized by slow, gliding inter-note transitions and the other by fast, direct ones. Time of transitions, pitch profiles and certain acoustic features like spectral centroid, entropy, kurtosis, skewness etc. were first compared for these two clip-categories. Next, Electroencephalogram (EEG) experiment was performed on 5 participants, using these two kinds of clips as input signals. Extracted neural signals were analyzed with help of robust non-linear scaling technique of ‘Multifractal Detrended Fluctuation Analysis’. The neural responses corresponding to these two contrasting transitions were then compared with parameters like EEG-complexity and EEG-entropy. This pilot-study is a novel attempt to understand the acoustic attributes and characteristics of two contrasting melodic transitions of ICM, as well as their corresponding neural correlates.