  Raga is a fundamental melodic concept in Indian Art Music (IAM). It is
characterized by complex patterns. All performances and compositions are based
on the raga framework. Raga and tonic detection have been a long-standing
research problem in the field of Music Information Retrieval. In this paper, we
attempt to detect the raga using a novel feature to extract sequential or
temporal information from an audio sample. We call these Sequential Pitch
Distributions (SPD), which are distributions taken over pitch values between
two given pitch values over time. We also achieve state-of-the-art results on
both Hindustani and Carnatic music raga data sets with an accuracy of 99% and
88.13%, respectively. SPD gives a great boost in accuracy over a standard pitch
distribution. The main goal of this paper, however, is to present an
alternative approach to modeling the temporal aspects of the melody and thereby
deducing the raga.
