Raagas in my Sound (Please forgive if i'm wrong anywhere, and Please comment to correct it. Thank you)

SOUND AND MUSIC Music is an extremely subjective, aural experience. Some sounds are perceived by us as pleasant and some others as unpleasant. What is considered pleasant or unpleasant can be quite personal, based on our specific culture, exposure to particular kinds of music and perhaps even on what our parents told us. A song could be a major hit in one country and could be completely disliked and ignored in some other country. Our musical tastes are indeed developed. As we grow up, and discover music from other cultures or newer musical styles, our tastes too change. Sometimes, we even discover a pleasant piece of music purely by accident - because it simply happened to resonate with our inner sensibilities. Oh, nothing like self discovery ! So how do we make sense of sound and music ? Let us try to answer this by examining some simple concepts first. Our high school physics tells us that sound has several features - such as pitch, intensity, quality and duration. The pitch is just the frequency of the sound vibration - given in hertz or cycles. The musical term for frequency is 'tone'. The audible frequency range extends from about 25 Hz to around eight or ten thousand hertz, although it depends entirely on the individual. Children can hear much higher frequencies. At the lower end of the range, even if we may not 'hear' ultralow frequencies, we may 'feel' the vibrations as a tactile sensation. The intensity is the same as loudness and it is related to the amplitude of the sound wave. One should learn to not confuse the intensity with the frequency. For example, try to recite the nursery rhyme 'Baa baa black sheep, Have you any wool ?' When you come to the syllable 'bl' in the phrase 'black sheep' (or 'woo' in the word 'wool') you are hitting a higher 'tone' compared to 'Baa baa'. This is the effect of frequency. Now, you can either whisper this nursery rhyme or shout your guts out. In each case, you are simply changing the intensity. The other attribute of sound - duration - is self-explanatory. It is simply the time during which the specific frequency or 'tone' lasts. The term 'quality' is more difficult to understand. It is simply a signature of the source of the sound. It is a term which explains why a violin sounds like a violin and a drum sounds like a drum. This attribute is precisely the reason you can make out your mother's voice over the phone even if she has a horrible cold. The bottomline is, when you or an instrument produce sound, you not only produce one frequency, but also produce a spectrum consisting of several 'overtones'. This is variously referred to as 'timbre' or 'tone color'. This constitutes the 'Quality' of that sound. Just to explain this concept some more, let us say you try to produce a single frequency with your voice - one way to 'produce' a single frequency is to get a keyboard and keep pressing one of its keys and you hum along till you resonate. If you actually analyzed the waveform you produced, you will see not only a significant amount of the frequency you were trying to produce but also see small amounts of other frequencies - which are the overtones. The exact composition of overtones you produced is in some sense the signature of your voice and constitutes its quality. This should also set you thinking. Just how in the world do you perceive sounds ? How do you identify your friend's voice ? Clearly you are not decomposing it into frequency components (Fourier analysis). How do you sometimes make out which song it is simply by listening to a few notes ? How is it that you can mentally 'visualize' (!) someone's voice, laughter, sounds, some past conversations, songs ? Basically, when you hear sounds and music, you are simply doing a 'pattern recognition' against what you already know. Over the years, your brain has stored a certain number of 'primitives' - this list is a dynamic one and primitives are added or lost as you grow older - and you have an intrinsic capability to match a freshly heard sound impulse to the basic database. If you hear a strange sound that does not produce a match, sometimes you load it up as a primitive. An equally interesting exercise - think of five songs you really like. Can you explain why you like them or what is in common with all of them ? Can you 'explain' and define your musical taste ? Unfortunately, however much analysis one does, in terms of frequencies and so forth, it finally boils down to psychological factors when it comes to music and taste. Analysis is merely a tool to understand some of its structure. It can never explain why some musical sounds are deemed 'romantic' or 'harsh' or why some Ragam is an evening Ragam (if you believe in such things). Such mystique about music will come back to haunt us and will forever prevent us from understanding its totality in an objective manner.K.J.Yesudas P.Jayachandran Unni Mennon K.S.Chithra K.J.Yesudas