  Tabla, a percussion instrument, mainly used to accompany vocalists,
instrumentalists and dancers in every style of music from classical to light in
India, mainly used for keeping rhythm. This percussion instrument consists of
two drums played by two hands, structurally different and produces different
harmonic sounds. Earlier work has done labeling tabla strokes from real time
performances by testing neural networks and tree based classification methods.
The current work extends previous work by C. V. Raman and S. Kumar in 1920 on
spectrum modeling of tabla strokes. In this paper we have studied spectral
characteristics (by wavelet analysis by sub band coding method and using
torrence wavelet tool) of nine strokes from each of five tablas using Wavelet
transform. Wavelet analysis is now a common tool for analyzing localized
variations of power within a time series and to find the frequency distribution
in time frequency space. Statistically, we will look into the patterns depicted
by harmonics of different sub bands and the tablas. Distribution of dominant
frequencies at different sub-band of stroke signals, distribution of power and
behavior of harmonics are the important features, leads to categorization of
tabla.
