This work was done with Asawari Keskar and Dr. Preeti Rao at the Digital Audio Processing Lab, IIT Bombay .

This is a study of a special type of concert in Hindustani classical music called Jasrangi Jugalbandi. This format involves a male and a female singer singing the same keyboard notes in 2 different ragas (scales) using the concept of mode shifting or murchana.
This project was published in ISMIR 2021 . Links to the paper and poster .

Background

Transposition

In various forms of modal music, it is common to obtain multiple scales from the same set of notes by just changing the tonic note. This concept is called murchana in Indian classical music. Below is an example of such a type of murchana where the singer, Gayatri, sings the notes of raga Chandrakauns in the concert tonic, i.e. G# (playing in the tanpuras), followed by the same keyboard notes in raga Madhukauns by assuming the tonic to be the madhyam (fourth note), i.e. C# above the concert tonic.

Jasrangi Jugalbandi (JJ)

This type of concert was first conceptualised by Pt. Jasraj in the year 2012. Since male and female vocalists usually have natural vocal ranges that differ by around 5-7 semitones, this concert allows them to sing in their comfortable tonics (Sa) using the concept of murchana with the same notes.

Here is an example of such a concert by Dr. Ashwini Bhide Deshpande and Pt. Sanjeev Abhyankar singing ragas Abhogi and Kalavati respectively.

Our Research

Motivations

Through our conversations with musicians we identified the following challenges during interaction of singers in this format of concert:

1. The singers have to preserve raga specific characteristics
2. They also have to meaningfully link phrases

Hence we sought to analyse the following:

1. Study the extent to which individual raga-specific characteristics are preserved in a JJ concert
2. Study the interaction between the 2 singers in the JJ concert

Research Material

Here is a video of me talking about our research paper: