DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.7726167
title: Carnatic Varnam Dataset

description: Carnatic varnam dataset is a collection of 28 solo vocal recordings, recorded for our research on intonation analysis of Carnatic raagas. The collection has the audio recordings, taala cycle annotations and notations in a machine readable format. <em>*This new 1.1 version includes additional information to align the notation w.r.t time.</em> <strong>Audio music content</strong> They feature 7 varnams in 7 rāgas sung by 5 young professional singers who received training for more than 15 years. They are all set to Adi taala. Measuring the intonation variations require absolutely clean pitch contours. For this, all the varṇaṁs are recorded without accompanying instruments, except the drone. <strong>Taala annotations</strong> The recordings are annotated with taala cycles, each annotation marking the starting of a cycle. We have later automatically divided each cycle into 8 equal parts. The annotations are made available as sonic visualizer annotation layers. Each annotation is of the format m.n where m is the cycle number and n is the division within the cycle. All m.1 annotations are manually done, whereas m.[2-8] are automatically labelled. <strong>Notations</strong> The notations for 7 varnams are procured from an archive curated by Shivkumar, in word document format. They are manually converted to a machine readable format (yaml). Each file is essentially a dictionary with section names of the composition as keys. Each section is represented as a list of cycles. Each cycle in turn has a list of divisions. <strong>Notations</strong> The notation is given a single time per section, however, to align the svaras with the tala annotations, structure information is given. The structure is given in yaml format, specifying the order of the sections, and how many svaras are sung per each tala tick. Broadly, there are just two only cases, 2 svaras per tick, and 4 svaras per tick.<br> The structure information has been added in the 1.1 version of the dataset. No code is given to load the structure information and relate it with the rest of data in the dataset. You may refer to the mirdata loader of the Carnatic Varnam dataset where in this case, tools to easily load the dataset are given. The structure annotations and the mirdata loader have been curated and implemented by Adithi Shankar and Genís Plaja. <strong>Possible uses of the dataset</strong> The distinct advantage of this dataset is the free availability of the audio content. Along with the annotations, it can be used for melodic analyses: characterizing intonation, motif discovery and tonic identification. The availability of a machine readable notation files allows the dataset to be used for audio-score alignment. Using this dataset If you use this dataset in a publication, please cite: Koduri, G. K., Ishwar, V., Serrà, J., & Serra, X. (2014). Intonation analysis of rāgas in Carnatic music. Journal of New Music Research, 43(01), 73–94. http://hdl.handle.net/10230/25676 We are interested in knowing if you find our datasets useful! If you use our dataset please email us at mtg-info@upf.edu and tell us about your research. <strong>Contact</strong> If you have any questions or comments about the dataset, please feel free to write to us. <br> Music Technology Group,<br> Universitat Pompeu Fabra,<br> Barcelona, Spain<br> mtg-info &lt;at&gt; upf &lt;dot&gt;edu http://compmusic.upf.edu/carnatic-varnam-dataset