Deep Structure of Ragas – the 100 Ragas Initiative

Indian music is strongly influenced by the system of ragas, yet the definition of what a raga means has remained vastly elusive and subject to individual interpretation. Most objective attempts at defining the notion of a raga has led to definitions to what it is not. Is it a composition? – No. Is it a scale? – No. Is it a subset of the notes in an octave? – No.

Here we attempt to define ragas as semi-lexical languages – which provides a grammatical backbone to the task of learning by examples. A raga is similar to a language in many ways. It has an alphabet consisting of the notes that are used in that raga. It has a vocabulary of the phrases (sequences of notes) that are used in that raga. On the other hand, the way that a note is applied (such as the Sa of Marwa, Puriya, Sohini) or the way in which a phrase is rendered can be defining signatures of a raga. Such nuances are not expressible purely in terms of lexical sequences, but may be learned through examples. A combination of such lexical and non-lexical artifacts constitute the deep structure of a raga.

Shrutinandan, the music school founded for children by Pt. Ajoy Chakrabarty has imbibed an exposition of the deep structure of ragas in its pedagogy of teaching music, and this has yielded rich dividends. Now IIT Kharagpur is collaborating with Panditji on the very ambitious objective of analyzing, articulating and archiving the deep structure of 100 popular Indian ragas.

Formalizing a Modern Pedagogy of Indian Raga Music

India is uniquely bestowed with its rich heritage in classical arts, spanning the domains of music, dance, fine arts, theater, and other performing arts. Due to various socio-economic reasons, the traditional guru-shishya parampara through which these art forms have been passed on from one generation to the next is unlikely to survive in future. It is therefore important to discover a modern pedagogy for building awareness, teaching and learning our traditional art forms, so that these may be appreciated, practiced, researched and improvised upon by the future generations. IIT Kharagpur believes that this can be made possible through appropriate technological interventions that can make the teaching-learning experience interesting and innovative, while carefully preserving the core fundamentals of the traditional art forms.

Connecting the Research with Cognitive Influences of Music

What enables an artist of Indian Classical Music to render a raga for more than an hour without adhering to any written notation? The creative liberty in rendering raga music without using notation is an unique feature of Indian music, and is a cognitive marvel. What are the cognitive skills that makes this possible? What kind of left-brain right-brain coordination is needed for this? What kind of concentration is needed for this task? How can such skills be cultivated, and are they ingrained in the traditional pedagogy of learning music in India? Can such skills also improve the learning experience of other subjects? Can learning music lead to developing certain cognitive capabilities which helps in concentration, creativity, and eventually better research abilities? Through this domain of study, the Academy intends to explore the impact of the Indian style of learning music on the general cognitive abilities that lead to innovation and scientific abilities.