Re: Morning versus Evening Ragas

[Justin London <jlondon@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Doug & List,

Enculturated listeners as well as experts certainly can do this.  The  
association between Ragas and times of day is characteristic of North  
Indian musical practice, I believe.  You can/should look up "Raga" and  
"India" in the Grove Dictionary of Music (Oxford Online).  Another  
good/related source is:

Widdess, Richard (1995) The Ragas of Early Indian Music. Clarendon  
Press (OUP).

I suspect your interests might be along the lines of "what in the  
acoustical signal distinguishes one raga from another" and this is  
tricky to tease out.  To give a western musical analogy, the  
difference between a Baroque minuet and a gigue rests on a few  
characteristic features (mostly in terms of characteristic rhythmic  
figures and tempo), but also depends on lots of features in common  
with Baroque music more generally (e.g., timbres, intonation systems,  
basslines, etc.).

All best,
Justin London

On Sep 2, 2010, at 1:00 PM, Douglas Eck wrote:

Maybe this isn't the perfect list for this question, but I suspect
I'll get an answer or two.

I'm curious about morning versus evening ragas.  Can musical experts
tell them apart?  What are the qualities that define a morning versus
evening raga?
Is it something that would show up via an acoustical analysis of the
audio drawn from lots of morning and evening ragas?

Citations would be great. Or just some observations.

Thanks in advance,
Doug Eck
------------------------------------------
Dr. Douglas Eck
Research Scientist, Google
Areas: Music and Machine Learning
http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~eckdoug

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Justin London, Professor of Music (and other stuff)
Carleton College
Department of Music
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