Hindustani Classical Music: A Historical and Computational Study

Authors: Soubhik Chakraborty, Swarima Tewari, Arshi Rahman, Maria Jamal, Apra Lipi, Apoorva Chakraborty, Apoorva Nanda, and Pranjala Shukla
ISBN: 9788194783008
Binding: Hardcover
Year: 2021
Pages: 171 with numerous colour and b/w figures, tables, and photos
Size: 15 x 23 x 1 cm Weight: 354 grams Price: INR 795.00



Hindustani Classical Music: A Historical and Computational Study

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Hindustani Classical Music: A Historical and Computational Study
About the Book
This work aims to address the historical development of the great Indian raga tradition, enhanced by computational approaches, and to use computational strategies to analyze aspects of contemporary Hindustani classical music (HCM). It is divided into two parts with Part 1 focusing on the history and aesthetics of HCM and Part 2 covering its computational aspects. The historical development of HCM in the ancient, medieval and modern periods; its terms and genre; and its Khayal gharanas are covered in Part 1. The subtopics include essential concepts such as raga, tala, shruti, thaat, gharana, khayal, dhrupad, thumri, tappa, etc. Part 2 covers the state-of-the-art in computational musicology, raga analysis and song analysis using statistics. The subtopics include statistical modeling, inter onset interval, note duration analysis, pitch movement between the notes, rate of change of pitch (pitch velocity) and probabilistic analysis of musical notes. The author concludes the work with reflecting on the lives of a few renowned musicians and musicologists with an account of hilarious moments taken from their lives to excite the reader to know more about HCM. This book would be useful for musicians, musicologists, researchers in music history, aesthetics, computational musicology, and advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of music and musicology.

Awarded the best book on raga music by the Indian Music Therapy Association (IMTA) in the year 2022.
About the Authors
Soubhik Chakraborty

Primarily a statistician, Soubhik Chakraborty is currently a Professor and formerly Head in the department of Mathematics, Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, Ranchi, Jharkhand, India. His research interests are algorithm and music analysis involving extensive use of computational statistics. He has been guiding several research scholars leading to PhD in these areas and has published over 100 papers, 4 books and 7 research monographs. He is also an acknowledged reviewer associated with ACM, IEEE and AMS. Himself an amateur harmonium player and a former flutist, his recently published book Computational Musicology in Hindustani Music, joint with Prof. Guerino Mazzola (School of Music, University of Minnesota, USA) and Chakraborty’s own PhD scholars Dr Swarima Tewari and Dr Moujhuri Patra published by Springer in 2014 is the first book dedicated to the topic. He is also one of the authors of the book Signal Analysis of Hindustani Classical Music, Springer, 2017 jointly authored by Prof. Asoke Kumar Datta of Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata and four other co-authors.
Swarima Tewari

A B.E. in Electrcal Engineering and an MTech. In Scientific Computing, Swarima Tewari has completed her PhD in the area of Computational Musicology, under the guidance of Prof. Soubhik Chakraborty, from Department of Mathematics, BIT Mesra, Ranchi, India. She is one of the authors of the book Computational Musicology in Hindustani Music published by Springer in 2014. She has the experience of working as a project fellow in a major research project titled Analyzing the Structure and Performance of Hindustani Classical Music through Statistics sponsored by the University Grants Commission with Prof. Soubhik Chakraborty as the principal investigator.
Arshi Rahman

Arshi Rahman completed her Integrated M.Sc. in Mathematics and Computing from Department of Mathematics, Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, Ranchi, India. Currently she is employed in Price Waterhouse Coopers (PwC).
Maria Jamal

Maria Jamal completed her Integrated M.Sc. in Mathematics and Computing from Department of Mathematics, Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, Ranchi, India. Currently she is employed in Byju’s Think and Learn Pvt. Ltd.
Apra Lipi

Apra Lipi completed her Integrated M.Sc. in Mathematics and Computing from Department of Mathematics, Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, Ranchi. Currently she is a Guest faculty in Mathematics at Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherjee University in Ranchi, India.
Apoorva Chakraborty

Apoorva Chakraborty, an amateur Hindustani classical vocalist, is a Sangeet Visharad from Pracheen Kala Kendra, Chandigarh, India. She is also a certified music therapist from NADA Centre for Music Therapy, India. She is a student of Psychology (Hons) at Nalanda Open University. She has coauthored the award winning book Hindustani Classical Music: A Historical and Computational Study, Sanctum Books, 2021 with Prof. Soubhik Chakraborty.

Email: apoorvachakraborty2001@gmail.com
Affiliation: Nalanda Open University, Patna-800001, Bihar, India
Apoorva Nanda

Apoorva Nanda has completed her MTech in Computer Science from Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Birla institute of Technology, Mesra, Ranchi, India. Currently she is employed in Qualcomm India Pvt. Ltd.
Pranjala Shukla

Pranjala Shukla has completed her M.Tech in Computer Science from Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Birla institute of Technology, Mesra, Ranchi, India. Currently she is employed in Cloudcover Pvt Ltd (STT Telemedia). Previously she was employed in HCL Technologies Ltd. She has coauthored the award winning book Hindustani Classical Music: A Historical and Computational Study, Sanctum Books, 2021 with Prof. Soubhik Chakraborty.

Email: pranjala.shukla@gmail.com
Address: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, BIT
Mesra, Ranchi-835215, Jharkhand, India
Editorial Reviews



“In this superb book of transnational history, Richard Jaffe uncovers the role that South Asia played in the shaping of modern Japanese Buddhism. Using a wide array of primary sources, he brings to light the forgotten stories of those scholars and seekers who make arduous journeys across the oceans, seeking the traces of the Buddha in the land of his birth. Seeking Sakyamuni is a landmark work of scholarship: rigorously researched, sharply analyzed, and beautifully written. It richly illuminates the religious and intellectual history of Asia, the world’s most populous and most prosperous continent.”
—Ramachandra Guha, author of India After Gandhi
Seeking Sakyamuni will entice and reward readers working on many corners of the Buddhist world. Revealing a 19th- and 20th-century history of complex Buddhist, commercial, and political networks and entanglements within and beyond Asia, Jaffe teaches us much about the more recent history of Japanese Buddhism. Simultaneously, he reveals the central role of intra-Asian engagements in the creation of new modes of Buddhist organization and expression in Japan as well as India, Sri Lanka, Burma, and Thailand. Richard Jaffe’s longstanding interest in Buddhist objects and aesthetic forms greatly enriches this study, reminding scholars of modern Buddhism not to neglect the changing visual and spatial arguments that reflected and shaped Japanese Buddhist mobility in Asia.”
—Anne Blackburn, Cornell University
“Japanese Buddhism, like all religions, confronted a rapidly changing world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and had to remake itself in order to survive. The prevailing view has been that it did so by appropriating European models of religious learning and practice. Seeking Sakyamuni offers an important corrective to this view, demonstrating that South Asia—India, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia—loomed large in Japan’s new construction of Buddhism. Through thick description of Japanese scholarpriests residing long-term in South Asia, of wealthy Japanese tourists making “pilgrimages” to India’s Buddhist sites, of Japanese architectural innovations gesturing to Indian motifs, of South Asian monks participating in Japanese scholarly enterprises, and of much more, Jaffe shows that India left a visible imprint on Japan’s new Buddhism. This was not the result of a one-way transfer of religious culture in any particular direction. Rather, it was part of the creation of many modern Buddhisms out of cultural flows from East Asia, South Asia, and the West, which were ‘entangled, circulatory, and intercrossing.’”
—James Dobbins, Oberlin College
“An exceptionally well-researched and insightfully presented account of Japanese Buddhist travelers to South Asia during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the overall reception and impact of Indian Buddhism on the understanding and production of Japanese Buddhist temples, texts, and various aspects of intellectual and material culture in the modern period.”
—Steve Heine, Florida International University
“Richly documented, engagingly narrated, and methodologically innovative...”
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
“Searching implies looking for a thing knowing it exists and focussing on finding it out. However, the act of seeking seems to come with a deeper connotation of finding a new purpose, an enriched understanding, and a fulfilment of the seeker. Seeking Sakyamuni is a book of extensive and intensive research by Richard M. Jaffe in seeking the transnational history of the role of the Indian subcontinent in the formation of modern Japanese Buddhism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book also works as a corrective to the prevailing notion that the rise of Indian Buddhist studies in Japan was the result of the importation of European and American scholarship in Japan. Contrarily, it was predominantly the outcome of the interpersonal, scholastic, spiritual, and artistic connection of Japanese Buddhism to South Asia through the educated clerics and laity who travelled to South Asia, mainly India, and brought back relics, images, artworks, and texts; thus bringing a new understanding of Buddhism.

As the book evidently presents to the readers, the contributors of this newer and deeper comprehension of Buddhism were vivid in their nature. Some of them were oriented in presenting the ritualistic mode rather than its rational face, while the others were contrarily trying to embrace the monastic, hierarchic brand. A third but smaller group was trying to discover the true practices as taught by the Buddha. Coming closer to the land of the origin on Buddhism, gave them new exposure to engage and educate themselves and carry forward their understanding and insight to Japan in the pursuit of modernisation of the ism.

This often appeared to be in sharp contrast with their understanding of Buddhism in the pre-modern period, when Japanese direct contact with India was extremely rare. The longing was intense, but the distance and difficulty of travel to India was overtasking. Remembrance of the Buddha (nenbutsu) was the way to meet him. Such a surrealistic connection gave rise to its own challenges. The findings of the pioneering travellers from Japan to India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that have been meticulously researched and documented in this book often helped to clear the cobwebs of the previous understandings. The new understanding was based on the availability of information brought by these Japanese travellers from South Asia, heightened by new technologies like steamships, textile mills, mass printing, reinforced concrete construction, and photography. The evolving political and economic concerns also facilitated these pathways of closer ties between the two lands. This also gave rise to the pan-Asianist spirit in Japan, encouraging to build up a transnational solidarity with other Asians.

The readers will find in this book a historical canvas portraying the formation of modern Japanese Buddhism with shapes and colours from the Indian subcontinent, the land of its origin, giving rise to forms of mobility and exchange that transcend borders of nations and enchant the beholder with a thrill of experiencing the ever dynamic and subtle movement of man’s spirit of seeking.”

Prabuddha Bharata, September 2024: Vol. 129, No. 9
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