  Gamakas are an integral aspect of Carnatic Music, a form of classical music
prevalent in South India. They are used in ragas, which may be seen as melodic
scales and/or a set of characteristic melodic phrases. Gamakas exhibit
continuous pitch variation often spanning several semitones. In this paper, we
study how gamakas scale with tempo and propose a novel approach to change the
tempo of Carnatic music pieces. The music signal is viewed as consisting of
constant-pitch segments and transients. The transients show continuous pitch
variation and we consider their analyses from a theoretical stand-point. We
next observe the non-uniform ratios of time-scaling of constant-pitch segments,
transients and silence in excerpts from nine concert renditions of varnams in
six ragas. The results indicate that the changing tempo of Carnatic music does
not change the duration of transients significantly. We report listening tests
on our algorithm to slow down Carnatic music that is consistent with this
observation.
