Causal Analysis of Carnatic Music: A Preliminary Study
This addresses the problem of understanding causal relationships in Carnatic music for musicologists and AI researchers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing automated analysis methods.
The study tackled the challenge of analyzing the musicological structure of Carnatic music by proposing a novel causal discovery framework using a compression-complexity measure, and found that context-free grammar from complex compositions like Mēlakarta rāga acts as a structural cause for Janya rāga.
The musicological analysis of Carnatic music is challenging, owing to its rich structure and complexity. Automated \textit{rāga} classification, pitch detection, tonal analysis, modelling and information retrieval of this form of southern Indian classical music have, however, made significant progress in recent times. A causal analysis to investigate the musicological structure of Carnatic compositions and the identification of the relationships embedded in them have never been previously attempted. In this study, we propose a novel framework for causal discovery, using a compression-complexity measure. Owing to the limited number of compositions available, however, we generated surrogates to further facilitate the analysis of the prevailing causal relationships. Our analysis indicates that the context-free grammar, inferred from more complex compositions, such as the \textit{Mē\d{l}akarta} \textit{rāga}, are a \textit{structural cause} for the \textit{Janya} \textit{rāga}. We also analyse certain special cases of the \textit{Janya rāga} in order to understand their origins and structure better.