Which Raga is Restful and which Restless? A Statistical Comparison between Todi and Bhairavi

Music is one of the oldest forms of art, which people listen to, to experience joy. A raga, in Indian classical music, is a melodic structure with fixed notes and a set of rules characterizing a certain mood conveyed through performance. In recent years we have seen a lot of research being done on music signals pertaining to several issues such as how or why music really evokes emotion in the human mind. It is not surprising that listeners have experienced different emotional feelings while listening to different ragas. In this paper we are doing a comparative statistical study between two ragas, one being aesthetically known to be restful and the other restless in nature. While the statistical analysis confirms the aesthetic point of view, it is also an eye opener to the fact that sad music, which is generally connected with higher note duration and hence thought to be restful, need not always be so!