Segmentation and Analysis of Taniavartanam in Carnatic Music Concerts

In Carnatic music concerts, taniavartanam is a solo percussion segment that showcases intricate and elaborate extempore rhythmic evolution through a series of homogeneous sections with shared rhythmic characteristics. While taniavartanam segments have been segmented from concerts earlier, no effort has been made to analyze these percussion segments. This paper attempts to further segment the taniavartanam portion into musically meaningful segments. A taniavartanam segment consists of an abhipraya, where artists show their prowess at extempore enunciation of percussion stroke segments, followed by an optional korapu, where each artist challenges the other, and concluding with mohra and korvai, each with its own nuances. This work helps obtain a comprehensive musical description of the taniavartanam in Carnatic concerts. However, analysis is complicated owing to a plethora of tala and nade. The segmentation of a taniavartanam section can be used for further analysis, such as stroke sequence recognition, and help find relations between different learning schools. The study uses 12 hours of taniavartanam segments consisting of four tala-s and five nade-s for analysis and achieves 0.85 F1-score in the segmentation task.