Exploring the Correspondence of Melodic Contour With Gesture in Raga Alap Singing

Musicology research suggests a correspondence between manual gesture and melodic contour in raga performance. Computational tools such as pose estimation from video and time series pattern matching potentially facilitate larger-scale studies of gesture and audio correspondence. We present a dataset of audiovisual recordings of Hindustani vocal music comprising 9 ragas sung by 11 expert performers. With the automatic segmentation of the audiovisual time series based on analyses of the extracted F0 contour, we study whether melodic similarity implies gesture similarity. Our results indicate that specific representations of gesture kinematics can predict high-level melodic features such as held notes and raga-characteristic motifs significantly better than chance.