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Back in the 1980's the team of the Indian Society for Traditional Arts Research (ISTAR) started work on computer assisted research of Hindustani classical music. It was the engineer and computer scientist Bernard Bel who created a laboratory at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) in Mumbai with the support of the same institution and the Ford Foundation. Apart from Bernard the team included Joep Bor (botanist and sarangi player), Jim Arnold (musicologist and dhrupad singer) and Wim van der Meer (anthropologist and khayal singer). Joep, Jim [...]

by Suvarnalata Rao and Wim van der Meer Paper presented at FRSM Gwalior 2009 Abstract Microtonality (shruti) is regarded as an essential and core aspect of the raga performance in Indian art music. In fact, musicians invariably refer to and rely on specific intonations as an identifying feature for certain ragas, like the komal Gandhar (flat third) in raga Darbari. 
In this paper an attempt is made to ascertain the validity of this assumption with an empirical case study of intonation of komal Dha (flat sixth) in five different ragas, [...]

Shruti is a sacred revelation, that which is heard, heard by the sages who passed on this knowledge to their disciples and the people in general. Much later, this manifestation in sound was committed to writing. In the Indian tradition this written form is not really reliable, much is missing from it. Nicholas Cook remarked that "the score conceals as much as it reveals"Cook, 81 and this can be applied to that idea of shruti, the full monty comes only in the oral tradition. Leo Treitler challenges the reliability [...]

Kishori Amonkar on culture Times of India SATURDAY, JAN 15 2011 page 23 MUSIC, RHYTHM & RAGA HARKIRAN SINGH BHASIN NAMITA DEVIDAYAL Kishori Amonkar, the irascible diva who has just received the NCPA Lifetime Award, talks about her love for Maugham and her complex relationship with her mom, Mogubai. I grew up to Kishori Amonkar's voice. Every time my mother placed the Thorens needle on the long playing record, and the crackling gave way to the slow cadences of Sahela Re in raga Bhoop, I suspect the ferns [...]

Holland (Nederland) is famous for its cheese. Nonsense. There is hardly any dutch cheese worthy of the name. Well, that is, if we are talking about typical dutch cheeses, because there are some very nice blue, red and white cheeses made there by enthusiasts. Typical dutch cheese like Gouda and Edam, or its farmhouse biological versions made with unpasteurised milk used to be highly diverse from one to the other. Sometimes they would be very pungent, with a strong smell of cows, stables, pastures, and the like. And they could [...]