Raaga Encoded

Hi All,

It has been quite since, I wrote a post on "Theory of music". It's just that I am not having enough quality time these days to sit and write posts that are lengthy! Today, I managed to squeeze some time around 4:30 AM and here you go !

I prepared a matrix of booleans for each raaga emphasizing on "Swarasthaanams". Simple. Let us take "Keeravani" (21st Mela) - It's aarohanam and avarohanam goes like - S R2 G2 M1 P D1 N3. The 12 swara sthanam (Places) go like: S R1 R2 G2 G3 M1 M2 P D1 D2 N2 N3. So, let us start giving a "1" where the swara appears and a "0" where it doesn't. So, we get - "101101011001" for Keeravani. Similarly, Mayamalavagowla would have "110011011001", Sankarabharanam would have "101011010101" and so on.

Since we all know that Mela raaga will have all the 7 swaras, if you all all the digits of this binary string, you will get always "7" for any Melakartha Raaga. Let's take "Mohanam" - a Janya raaga (derived from mela, a subset of notes in Mela) - it would have "101010010100" - totalling only 5 !

Anyways, there are some relevances of this "Swarasthaanam" string.

Remember, all beginners in carnatic music are first introduced to "Sarali Varisai" set in "Maayamalavagowli". The main reason for it is because of the symmetricity of the string - or in other words, equal spacing of the frequencies - even though in the keyboard it is hard to find the symmetricity, you can appreciate the frequency spacing by looking at the "swarasthaanam" string.

Secondly, look at this string "111001011100". The thing that comes to one's mind is three 1's appearing twice inside this little string. Sounds good!! However, it doesn't sound that good if you play :)

Stay tuned and I will cover this in my next post.