  Carnatic music, a form of Indian Art Music, has relied on an oral tradition
for transferring knowledge across several generations. Over the last two
hundred years, the use of prescriptive notations has been adopted for learning,
sight-playing and sight-singing. Prescriptive notations offer generic
guidelines for a raga rendition and do not include information about the
ornamentations or the gamakas, which are considered to be critical for
characterizing a raga. In this paper, we show that prescriptive notations
contain raga attributes and can reliably identify a raga of Carnatic music from
its octave-folded prescriptive notations. We restrict the notations to 7 notes
and suppress the finer note position information. A dictionary based approach
captures the statistics of repetitive note patterns within a raga notation. The
proposed stochastic models of repetitive note patterns (or SMRNP in short)
obtained from raga notations of known compositions, outperforms the state of
the art melody based raga identification technique on an equivalent melodic
data corresponding to the same compositions. This in turn shows that for
Carnatic music, the note transitions and movements have a greater role in
defining the raga structure than the exact note positions.
