Carnatic Music Synthesis In Clojure by Srihari Sriraman at Functional Conf 15
Channel: ConfEngine
Date: 2015-10-09

I'm building a carnatic music (south indian classical music) synthesizer using Clojure and Overtone. Here's the library I'm building.

Carnatic music is different fundamentally in the movements of pitch ('Gamakams'), and needs to be modelled differently than most MIDI music out there today. The library now, can understand prescriptive carnatic music notation, build finer abstractions from that, and play back a not-so-terrible synth version with a plethora of configurable inputs.

The concept of 'Gamakam' (the transitions between notes) is central, so I'll go into it's guts and show how the library piggybacks on recent work on PASR (pitch-attack-sustain-release) and Dual-PASR ('stage' and 'dance' PASR components) transcriptions. I'll also put forth a path I see for fully synthetic carnatic music based on machine learning 'Ragams' (melodic modes).

I'll give a detailed demo of the synthetic music on the repl through the talk, and do a live voice vs synth comparison in the end.

More details: https://confengine.com/functional-conf-2015/proposal/1185

Conference: http://functionalconf.com

Thanks to  http://nilenso.com/ (@nilenso) for sponsoring this video.