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Modeling India's National Anthem: A Statistical Approach

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Author Affiliations

  • 1Department of Applied Mathematics, Birla Institute of Technology Mesra, Ranchi-835215,INDIA

Int. Res. J. Social Sci., Volume 1, Issue (2), Pages 17-24, October,14 (2012)

Abstract

A major strength of statistics lies in modeling. Modeling a musical structure or performance is both an interesting and challenging endeavour given that the true model is not only complex but unknown even to the composer. On the other hand, although statistical models are neither perfect nor unbiased, it should be understood that i. we can at least make the data objective or nearly so ii. the true model may have multiple parameters and we usually do not have explicit knowledge about them nor we know how or in what functional way they enter the model and iii. doing a stochastic realisation of this deterministic true model (the decision process of the composer is deterministic as any musical sequence of notes is planned and not random) is within the scope of statistics including controlling the errors in the model. The present work highlights our maiden attempt to model the national anthem of India using a simple exponential smoothing. The fit is found to be explaining the note progression well enough with a smoothing factor 0.716404. Should such a model work well for the national anthem of any other country, it is of interest to see how the smoothing factor varies. Experimenting with other sophisticated models like Kalman filter where the smoothing factor is not fixed but varying is also of interest.

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