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A myriad of sounds can be produced on the tabla, an Indian percussion instrument consisting of a pair of drums, by introducing slight changes in the position and manner of striking. The different regions on the drums are shown in the figure, striking each of which elicits a sound of slightly different acoustic characteristics.
Building on previous work that explored the possibility of building a system that can automatically identify common misarticulations in the playing of individual strokes, we conducted a study of the reliability of human perception in judging the quality / goodness of a tabla stroke from its audio alone.
(Narang and Rao, 2017)
The extent of agreement among three tabla expert players in ranking strokes of individual tabla strokes based on their acoustic quality was analyzed. We prepared, for this task, a dataset comprising recordings of strokes obtained from tabla learners of different levels of experience.
The results revealed some obvious and some not-so-obvious challenges in judging stroke goodness. There was poor agreement in the case of:
strokes that are difficult to play (by nature of the gesture required to produce them)
strokes that are affected more severely by the poor quality of the instrument itself
strokes that have different playing styles based on the school of training
Furthermore, when we tried to correlate a simple but musically motivated acoustic feature like the 'duration of sustain' with the perceptual ratings for a particular stroke ("Ghe") that is generally taught to be played such that it sounds sustained and resonant, the raters were found to favor playing styles that added some pitch modulation to the sound at the cost of sustain. Such a playing style is considered expressive and hence more skillful than simply a long sustain.
Further reading:
Further reading:
S. Nag, M.A. Rohit and P. Rao " Reliability of acoustic perception of Tabla strokes in determining their quality ", Proc. of Frontiers of Research on Speech and Music (FRSM), Dec 2017, Rourkela, India. (pdf)
K. Narang and P. Rao " Acoustic features for determining goodness of tabla strokes ", Proc. of the 18th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR), Oct 2017, Suzhou, China. (pdf)
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