Typical motifs of a rāga can be found in the various songs that are composed in the same rāga by different composers. The compositions in Carnatic music have a definite structure, the one commonly seen being pallavi, anupallavi and charanam. The tala is also fixed for every song. Taking lines corresponding to one or more cycles of the pallavi, anupallavi and charanam as one-liners, one-liners across different songs are compared using a dynamic programming based algorithm. The density of match between the one-liners and normalized cost along-with a new measure, which uses the stationary points in the pitch contour to reduce the false alarms, are used to determine and locate the matched pattern. The typical motifs of a rāga are then filtered using compositions of various rāgas. Motifs are considered typical if they are present in the compositions of the given rāga and are not found in compositions of other rāgas. © Shrey Dutta, Hema A. Murthy.