The Influence of Hindustani Classical Music on Bollywood Songs. A Statistical Outlook

Master's Thesis from the year 2019 in the subject Musicology - Miscellaneous, grade: 8.5, , language: English, abstract: The present work attempts to study the impact of Hindustani Classical Music on Bollywood in a legitimate manner using a statistical approach emphasizing on statistical modeling of musical structure and performance and other statistical features such as note duration and inter onset interval with a case study in raga Yaman.
Any music originates in the society and develops with the changing realities of it. It accepts new and modifies the existing cultural norms in different periods of time. This process of acceptance and rejection makes any form of art exist for long. Inspite of all this, in various phases, Hindustani classical music, being the base of many popular Bollywood songs has helped in their popularity and lifelong existence because of the strong focus on melody.
A raga, which is the nucleus of Indian classical music, be it Hindustani or Carnatic, is a melodic structure with fixed notes and a set of rules which characterize a certain mood conveyed by erformance. Hindustani ragas have embraced the elements of several Bollywood songs, which has given these songs a strong impact despite the strong influence of western art music in Bollywood music industry. The present work attempts to study this impact in a legitimate manner using a statistical approach emphasizing on statistical modeling of musical structure and performance and other statistical features such as note duration and inter onset interval with a case study in raga Yaman. It turns out that the same statistical model for both the raga bandishand a song based on the same raga, i.e., Yaman, an evening raga of the Kalyan thaat.

Dr. Soubhik Chakraborty, an M.Sc. (Statistics), PhD (Science) and NET (UGC/CSIR) in Mathematical Sciences, is currently serving as the Professor & Head, Department of Mathematics at Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, Ranchi, India. His research interests are algorithm analysis, music analysis and statistical computing. He has published several books, research monograms and research papers in peer reviewed journals of international and national repute in these areas apart from guiding several research scholars leading to PhD. He is also an acknowledged reviewer associated with ACM, AMS and IEEE. He has been a visiting scientist twice to Indian Statistical Institute (Bangalore Centre in 2002, Kolkata Centre in 2004, the latter under INSA fellowship). He is a leading figure in computational musicology and has written the first book on the topic (in the context of Hindustani music; see ref [1] in relevant publications). He has been the principal investigator of a UGC major research project titled Analyzing the structure and performance of Hindustani classical music through statistics in his institute. He has received several awards in both teaching and research including the National Award for Teaching Excellence (Mathematics) given by Indus Foundation (2013) and the Best Academic Researcher Award 2013 given by Association of Scientists, Developers and Faculties (2013). Prior to joining this institute in 2006 (Nov 30), he served as a lecturer in Statistics at T.M. Bhagalpur university where he taught Statistics at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels for about ten years.
Relevant Publications (books):-
1. Soubhik Chakraborty, Guerino Mazzola, Swarima Tewari and Moujhuri Patra, Computational Musicology in Hindustani Music, Springer, 20142. Asoke Kumar Datta, Sandeep Singh Solanki, Ranjan Sengupta, Soubhik Chakraborty, Kartik Mahto, Anirban Patranabis, Signal Analysis of Hindustani Classical Music, Springer, 20173. Shashi Bhushan Singh, Soubhik Chakraborty, Keashav Mohan Jha, Satish Chandra, Shanti Prakash and Swarima Tewari, Music and Medicine: Healing Brain Injury through Ragas, CBH publications, 2016