The tabla is a pitched percussion instrument, which means that both the drums can be struck in ways that produce sustained, harmonic sounds. While the harmonics may be too few on the bass drum (thereby giving rise to only a low-pitched hum and not a strongly pitched sound), the treble drum generally produces at least 4-5 harmonics.

These drums can and are also often struck in ways that produce non-sustained, damped sounds. Playing compositions or accompaniment to a lead artist involves playing these sustained (or resonant) and damped strokes in various sequential combinations.

Matrix factorization techniques are a popular class of algorithms used in machine learning problems to decompose and transform data into components that may have certain desirable properties. This process of decomposition is usually carried out by applying some constraints on the resulting components to make them more interpretable. Non-negative matrix factorization(NMF), for instance, requires that the components/factors have non-negative elements only. This offers certain useful representations in the case where the data is say, a magnitude spectrogram.