Frequency contour modeling to synthesize natural flute renditions for carnatic music

Abstract

Hidden Markov Models used for computer music synthesis do not satisfactorily reproduce Indian Carnatic music and also require large training datasets. The essence of Indian Carnatic music is its micro-tonal frequency variations called Gamakas. In this work, we study the flute note properties, features that characterize the Gamakas, and hence attempt to devise a generalized method for synthesizing Carnatic music flute compositions. Our method uses additive sinusoidal synthesis coupled with a stochastic noise model. In time domain, splines are used to model the amplitude envelope to ensure a natural reconstruction. Integrated frequency contours are used for smooth concatenation of notes and modelling of Gamakas and notes. In order to evaluate our synthesis, we use a Mean Opinion Score (MOS) survey to compare our results with the baseline and the original recordings. The MOS of the proposed method is around 3.5 while the baseline is 2.3. © 2018 IEEE.