savethesitar

The Chimta

Hello! It has been quite a while, hasn’t it. Apologies for the long absence. It started out due to a combination of the stress of the exams and Muneeb’s going to college, and then just extended itself. Now, however, things are looking up somewhat. I’ll try to keep things updating more regularly now – weContinue reading “The Chimta”

The Daf

So far we have covered many instruments, from the exalted sitar to the humble matka (the jury is still out on whether this is actually an instrument or now). However, we have never covered the national instrument of Pakistan, have we? So what will it be? The sitar? The tabla? The sarangi? We have noContinue reading “The Daf”

What is Your Favourite Sitar Gharana?

Does the rhythmic steady masitkhani baj of the Senia gharana call to you? Or are the singing sitarists of the Indore gharana your favourite? How about the lively playing of the Kapurthala rababis? Or the meend-using Pounch sitarists? How about the khayal-performing Delhi sitar players? We know its hard to choose from such a varietyContinue reading “What is Your Favourite Sitar Gharana?”

The Raag Classifier

Buoyed up by our victory with the instrument classifier, we next attempted to create a model which could classify the elusive and a raag classifier. The purpose of this project was to classify audio clips into four commonly-used raags: pahadi, darbari, yaman and bhairavi. We trained it exclusively on sitar recordings due to its beingContinue reading “The Raag Classifier”

The Instrument Classifier

This classifier classifies audio into seven instrumental categories: the sitar, the bansuri, the sarangi, the sarod, the tabla, the harmonium and Western music (a catch-all category for any piece of music which does not fit into the previous ones). This was the first of our projects which could truly be called ours – we wereContinue reading “The Instrument Classifier”