Finding Sa in a Song ?!

I was asked once by a friend who has learnt western but not carnatic about how i find the Sa in a song, or the scale. I didn't know what to say first because its always been an instinct, never something i could define. It may be easy by indentifying chords but well, I've never done that.

In some cases it'll be very obvious because of the ragam used in the song. But a lot of songs are there where its arguable as to which the Sa is. Some people argue saying its the note that u hit maximum in the song. I thought about it, but that never was how i ever found a Sa( not that i could defend explaining how i did). It confused me in cases only where there was a raga bedham. For example take 'konja neram' from chandramukhi. If u take the starting note as Pa u get valachi, if u take it as Sa u get abhogi ( of course the song is not purely in just this ragam but atleast starts that way). I somehow tended to go with valachi.

Sa can be fixed anywhere in a song. I guess its just the ease with which you extract the other notes compared to it , which decides its place.

When I used to take notes from a song for doing covers for our shows there were songs where in between there used to be scale changes in bgm. I used to take notes in swaram and when this happens, my Sa automatically changes and I would start confusing the hell out of the keyboardist :) For example in 'sundari' from thalapathy in second bgm, there will be a scale change with strings multiple tracks, cello and chorus. Was quite a task getting out the notes for all the tracks. There are loads of songs with such scale changes. I don't think most people ever realize.

I guess all this follows from the same confusion as my western violin classes - "Which is my Sa??" For those who did read that post, am getting better :) But its still swaram for me !!

Carnatic notations

My craze for blogging about notations is not yet gone :) The last one was about western notation and a technical view of representing sheet music using DSLs. But this one 's going to be pure music.
I recently found some websites describing carnatic notation and some even having staff notes for carnatic songs. The one describing the actual notation in swaram was quite head swarming and i felt it was still inadequate to actually render that piece effectively. Carnatic music learning as opposed to western learning has always been more vocal than notations. There is so much in each line, each touch, each transition of swara that conveying through notations is quite difficult and even if conveyed would take days for a person to understand one line completely. Just taking ragams for instance. There are so many ragams that don't actually have a rigid structure ( the janya ragas) and allow accidentals here and there. Most importantly a raga is identified more through a particular feel in it changing which kills the beauty of it. By feel i mean a particular gamakam in certain swarams. A great example would be sahana. Also a lot of sangathis are quite tough reading and learning rather than listening and learning. The chances are more of getting everything wrong when using just notations. Representing all of the gamakams, the way that fits that raga makes the notation quite tough to read and interpret as such.
Notations are important though at the basic level of learning. Especially to get the hang of swaras, the spacings between them and all the various basic ragams. But after varnam notations are too complex and inadequate. Maybe this way of learning( listening and playing or singing) has actually made it more difficult for me to just read notations, map them to western scale and play :)

A carnatic violinist learning western

I've been a carnatic violinist all along and suddenly felt i should explore other forms of music. So here i went and started western violin classes. I've been a part of my college music band and have always struggled in standing and playing any piece even western cause i was just not used to playing that way and never got the hang of how people did. Used to sit and play corrs instrumental pieces :) Anyways so first day of class I go and the sir says can you play something for me and i say can you please give me a seat ;) So classes started with learning how to read western notations first with spacing of notes and learning the "Every Good Boy Does Fine" and FACE. The initial lessons were in D major. Luckily the strings are tuned as lowest string is G, a Sa then D , its Pa then A who is D's Pa and E which is A's Pa so i could kind of visualize D as Sa, A as Pa in D major and play the notes with some mapping to swaram. Then came A major lessons cause the sir felt i had the basics and can start with the advanced lessons. It was fun starting with it cause simply i cound think of A as Sa and E as Pa and keep playing :) Then came the difficult part third string started coming in the lessons. But it was not a Pa like in carnatic but was a Ma or rather i need to keep switchin thinking which is my Sa and Pa. Phew!! On top of all this mental struggle the sir would suddenly say hey ur playing C instead of B and then i'll BLINK and the mental process will start calculating which Sa D or A and then where B and C was, what swaram basically. And all this while the sir is still staring down at me. To complicate my life more and increase my mental load, last week the third Sa came into the picture G major! And pieces with all four strings! Now am totally baffled and play really really slow so that my brain does not burst of switching Sa contexts. Last week was the funniest part. He suddenly started talking bout timing. He was like how many notes do you have in a semi quaver. So i knew the timing stuff but the names weren't something i could match when my brain was already loaded with Sa's. So as usual BLINKED and answered his question wrong and then a OH OK... when he finally answered it himself. So now here i am still struggling to get out of carnatic thinking and think of everything as western notes and play.... :'(

DSL And Music

A recent talk on DSL(Domain Specific Language) got me thinking about music notations and DSL( well am basically a carnatic musician but recently started learning western violin and sheet music has totally grabbed my interest right now) . I started surfing to see what has been done in this area and I got quite a lot of interesting information that i thought i could consolidate and blog about.
Sheet music is quite complex with so much meaning to each symbol to describe a song's scale, timing and notes with tracks for each instrument. So keying in notes and getting a sheet of notations has its own language to describe its various components. The most interesting thing i found was that there are several approaches and tools for this and several more coming up but there is no single standard that is used by everyone as well as no standard followed for the language specification. A widely prescribed one is based on XML, SMDL(Standard Music Description Language) and all the advantages of XML wrt interoperability is taken by it. MusicXML is a software using this which has a DTD for the notations. Apart from this there are several other language specifications using XML itself that extend SMDL. WEDEL is one such which uses XML but models using MOODS( Music Object Oriented Distributed System) for editing sheet music in a distributed environment like in orchestras. Other softwares are there for optical character recognition and interpreting from sheet music. A lot of freewares are available now for specifying notations and getting quality sheet printouts like LilyPond, iABC, Brahms each having its own specification .
A lot of work is still going on for supporting mordern music notations and standardizing the specification. A common music notation DSL could help a lot, probably taking the best of all the available specifications cause a common language makes communication easier always :)