Rāga forms the melodic framework for most of the music of the Indian subcontinent. Thus automatic rāga recognition is a fundamental step in the computational modeling of the Indian art-music traditions. In this work, we investigate the properties of rāga and the natural processes by which people identify it. We bring together and discuss the previous computational approaches to rāga recognition correlating them with human techniques, in both Karṇāṭak (south Indian) and Hindustānī (north Indian) music traditions. Thee approaches which are based on first-order pitch distributions are further evaluated on a large comprehensive dataset to understand their merits and limitations. We outline the possible short and mid-term future directions in this line of work.

This research was partly funded by the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Program, as part of the CompMusic project (ERC grant agreement 267583).