  We present a melody based classification of musical styles by exploiting the
pitch and energy based characteristics derived from the audio signal. Three
prominent musical styles were chosen which have improvisation as integral part
with similar melodic principles, theme, and structure of concerts namely,
Hindustani, Carnatic and Turkish music. Listeners of one or more of these
genres can discriminate between these based on the melodic contour alone.
Listening tests were carried out using melodic attributes alone, on similar
melodic pieces with respect to raga/makam, and removing any instrumentation cue
to validate our hypothesis that style distinction is evident in the melody. Our
method is based on finding a set of highly discriminatory features, derived
from musicology, to capture distinct characteristics of the melodic contour.
Behavior in terms of transitions of the pitch contour, the presence of
micro-tonal notes and the nature of variations in the vocal energy are
exploited. The automatically classified style labels are found to correlate
well with subjective listening judgments. This was verified by using
statistical tests to compare the labels from subjective and objective
judgments. The melody based features, when combined with timbre based features,
were seen to improve the classification performance.
