Visualizing Carnatic Ragas

For some time I have been taking my daughter to the Carnatic Music classes. Initially it was hard for me to connect with the new language of music. There are lots of new words to understand the lingua franca of this field: swaras, alankaram, alapana, aakaram, saahithyam, etc. I wanted to learn the basic principles behind the language of music and build up from there. I wish there are lego blocks style framework that is easy to learn from for an impatient adult mind. As a Child, I can imagine myself learning this through the steady route of rote practice. However with many demands on my plate I am not paying sufficient attention.

Something changed in the past month. The music teacher asked the parents to write down the notes for an alankaram. Boy, that was challenging. I managed to listen and write down the notes for one of sequences. And used that as a basis for describing the other alankaram sequences for the same ragam - Mohanam - as well. this was a great exercise for me to appreciate the assembly of the simple swaras from a raga to form the sequences. I also charted this in Excel to get the visual feel. Needless to say it is delightful.

Now I would like to connect the dots between the language of music, language of mandalas, language of kolams, and voice quality. I am sure that there is a strong interplay of nature between these different ways of expression. It is very likely that someone possibly has done sufficient research as well. I need to work on discovering the work and slowly learn the same. Perhaps I can also create some sort of Raga Studio that might allow me to play with the ragas in sound form and visual form.

I discovered this new site today - called Swara Sindhu - that purports to explain the basics nicely as well. Need to start the learning there ...