Tonic-independent stroke transcription of the mridangam

In this paper, we use a data-driven approach for the tonic-independent transcription of strokes of the mridangam, a South Indian hand drum. We obtain feature vectors that encode tonic-invariance by computing the magnitude spectrum of the constant-Q transform of the audio signal. Then we use Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) to obtain a low-dimensional feature space where mridangam strokes are separable. We make the resulting feature sequence event-synchronous using short-term statistics of feature vectors between onsets, before classifying into a predefined set of stroke labels using Support Vector Machines (SVM). The proposed approach is both more accurate and flexible compared to that of tonic-specific approaches.