Melodic and Metrical Elements of Expressiveness in Hindustani Vocal Music

This paper presents an attempt to study the aesthetics of khayal music with reference to the flexibility exercised by artists in performing well-known compositions. We study expressive timing and pitch variations of the given lyrical content within and across performances and propose computational representations that can discriminate between performances of the same song in terms of expression. We employ a dataset of two songs in two ragas each rendered by several prominent artists.