A Non Linear Multifractal Study to Illustrate the Evolution of Tagore Songs Over a Century
This addresses the problem of understanding cultural evolution in music for researchers in musicology and signal processing, but it is incremental as it applies an existing method to a new dataset.
The study analyzed four Tagore songs sung by five generations over 100 years using Multifractal Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (MFDFA) to identify singing style cues that maintain popularity, finding that multifractal spectral width indicates complexity and generational variations.
The works of Rabindranath Tagore have been sung by various artistes over generations spanning over almost 100 years. there are few songs which were popular in the early years and have been able to retain their popularity over the years while some others have faded away. In this study we look to find cues for the singing style of these songs which have kept them alive for all these years. For this we took 3 min clip of four Tagore songs which have been sung by five generation of artistes over 100 years and analyze them with the help of latest nonlinear techniques Multifractal Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (MFDFA). The multifractal spectral width is a manifestation of the inherent complexity of the signal and may prove to be an important parameter to identify the singing style of particular generation of singers and how this style varies over different generations. The results are discussed in detail.