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.