Intonation is an important concept in Carnatic music that/nis characteristic of a raaga, and intrinsic to the musical expression/nof a performer. In this paper we approach the description/nof intonation from a computational perspective,/nobtaining a compact representation of the pitch track of a/nrecording. First, we extract pitch contours from automatically/nselected voice segments. Then, we obtain a a pitch/nhistogram of its full pitch-range, normalized by the tonic/nfrequency, from which each prominent peak is automatically/nlabelled and parametrized. We validate such parametrization/nby considering an explorative classification task:/nthree raagas are disambiguated using the characterization/nof a single peak (a task that would seriously challenge a/nmore na¨ıve parametrization). Results show consistent improvements/nfor this particular task. Furthermore, we perform/na qualitative assessment on a larger collection of raagas,/nshowing the discriminative power of the entire representation./nThe proposed generic parametrization of the intonation/nhistogram should be useful for musically relevant/ntasks such as performer and instrument characterization.

This research was partly funded by the European Research/nCouncil under the European Union’s Seventh Framework/nProgram, as part of the CompMusic project (ERC grant/nagreement 267583). JS acknowledges JAEDOC069/2010/nfrom Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cient´ıficas, 2009-/nSGR-1434 from Generalitat de Catalunya, TIN2009-13692-/nC03-01 from the Spanish Government, and EU Feder Funds.