Ramanujan Auditorium

On the concept of Raga Parentage in Indian Music

M. V. N. Murthy

Retired Professor, IMSc

Over many centuries, after the concept of raga emerged in Indian classical
music, there have been many attempts to classify them. The most successful
semi-quantitative classification is the Venkatamakhi Melakartha system in
17th century. This system first defines precisely the nature of parent ragas
and assigns all other ragas as derived from a parent uniquely. This also
inspired Bhatkande to organise the Hindustani ragas using the concept of
Thaats. We critically examine these ancient concepts and practices from a
computational music perspective. The techniques developed by the Music
Technology group at IIT Madras form the backbone of this analysis. The
methods developed for this analysis have wide ranging application in many
other areas and these will be briefly mentioned.

Reference: On the concept of Raga Parentage in Carnatic Music. Jom
Kuriokose, Veena Suresh, Shrey DUtta, Hema Murthy and M V N Murthy. To
appear in JNMR 2023.
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