Acoustic Characterization of Mizo Folk Songs

This work presents an acoustic analysis on a database of Mizo folk songs, called the Tezpur University - Mizo Folk Song Database (TU-MFSD). This database comprises of six categories of Mizo folk songs from the North-East Indian state of Mizoram. These categories are - Hunting chants (Hlado), War chants (Bawh hla), Elderly group songs (Pi pu zai), Children's songs (Pawnto hla), and Celebration songs played on gongs (Dâr hla). The folk songs are collected from four sources - internet, Art & Culture Department of Mizoram, All India Radio, and field recordings. The total duration of all songs in the database is approximately 3 hrs. This paper gives a brief description of the songs in the database, and discusses the analysis performed on these folk songs using fundamental frequency (FO), short-time energy (E) and spectrograms. The acoustic characterization is carried out using source and filter features derived through speech signal processing methods. The main objective of this work is finding distinctive characteristics of Mizo folk songs and using these characteristics to classify them into different categories. The observations made from the analysis present valuable insights into the characterization and analysis of folk songs in Mizo.