Carnatic Music vs Hindustani Music vs Other forms

I simply couldn’t resist penning down my views on this subject after reading Smt. Lakshmi Sriram’s article in The Hindu (Chennai):
http://www.hindu.com/ms/2007/12/01/stories/2007120150210600.htm

I must admit that I am hardly familiar with forms of music other than Carnatic (and maybe to some extent Western Classical). However, I have attended a Hindustani concert or two, and I hope I do make sense when I talk about Hindustani music or other forms. Please correct me if I’m wrong. Of course, this post might be highly biased, but that is natural because it’s a personal opinion – take it or chuck it!

While not purely so, most forms of music have some aspect that results in ‘intellectual enjoyment’. One must be able to understand the nuances of the music to wholly appreciate it.

In my opinion, the ingredient of music that requires the least amount of musical training to appreciate is simple rhythm patterns. Somehow, I’m inclined to believe that this is why the likes of Shivamani are extremely popular – because they come up with simple, but yet innovative, rhythm patterns which the common man can understand and appreciate. The other ingredient is Lyrics, preferably in English. I attribute the popularity of those forms of “music” that I would love to derogate by branding them as ‘noise’ to the fact that they are rhythm-intensive or Lyrics-intensive, and thus understandable by most people.

Then there’s harmony. I found out from my friend that not everyone can actually appreciate harmony. Western music primarily relies on harmony. Western Classical music utilizes ensembles of instruments to produce harmonious tones. Other ingredients like the tonal content or rAga, are harder to pick up unless one is trained in the particular form of music.

Carnatic music involves not only a lot of rhythmic complexity (eg: Pallavis, or stuff played in a taniyAvartanam) that is hardly understandable to the untrained ear, but also a lot of tonal complexity (heavy bhRgas and gamakams) that requires a really fast ‘Fourier Transform’ in your brain! What is suprising is that training can make the brain capable of ‘parsing’ every single note in a tonally complex phrase of music.

While Hindustani music might be tonally complex, it is mostly mellifluous and doesn’t involve as much rhythmic complexity (unless I’m mistaken) as Carnatic Music. Carnatic music is sharp, whereas Hindustani is mellifluous; and unless your ‘Fourier Transform’ is fast enough, you can’t appreciate T N Sheshagopalan’s 3rd kAlam swaras in the Alapanai (I still can’t!), which will just sound like drab nonsensical oscillations with no tonal beauty, explaining the popular impression of Carnatic Music. Hindustani Music, especially when rendered popularly, on the other hand, doesn’t require as fast a Fourier Transform – except for some parts of the concert. Thankfully, Hindustani music has these slow phrases which the untrained ear can appreciate, making it more popular.

So I would conclude that the popularity of non-classical forms of music, and above that, that of Hindustani over Carnatic is mostly because Classical Music, and in particular, Carnatic Music doesn’t pander to the average unacquainted man but offers a steep learning curve and calls for appreciation at various levels – emotional and intellectual.

Artifical real-time reverb using sox

I had to dig through several pages of tweets to find this command:

sox -d -d reverb 80

It basically feeds back from the mic to the speaker with the reverb effect. So if you like a lot of reverb while playing a musical instrument, for instance, but your room doesn’t have the reverb, then you could run this to get the required reverb.

I’m putting this down here, so that I can search for it the next time I want it

There are other methods, like:

rec -t wav – | play -t wav – reverb 80

But that requires a lot of processing time, so there’s a significant delay between the input and the output…

A python IRC bot for keeping up with arXiv (or any RSS feed)

After some internet searching, it wasn’t hard to find enough inputs to write a IRC bot using Python. I hardly know any Python, but the language being so simple, you could write code in it just right away. Needless to say, the best part was that there were libraries for both Feed Parsing (duh!) and for IRC clients. A simple one hour long digging through documentation resulted in the following put-them-together code:


#!/usr/bin/python
#
# IRC b0t that keeps track of RSS feeds
#
# Licensed under the GNU General Public License v3
#
# Copyright (2009) by Akarsh Simha

import irclib
import feedparser
import os
import threading
import time

channel_list = [] # Put in a list of channels
feed_list = [ "http://arxiv.org/rss/hep-th", "http://arxiv.org/rss/cs", "http://arxiv.org/rss/math-ph", "http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot"]
old_entries_file = os.environ.get("HOME") + "/.b0t/old-feed-entries"

irc = irclib.IRC()
server = irc.server()

server.connect( "irc.freenode.org", 6667, "" ) # TODO: Make this general
# server.privmsg( "NickServ", "identify " )

msgqueue = []

def feed_refresh():
FILE = open( old_entries_file, "r" )
filetext = FILE.read()
FILE.close()
for feed in feed_list:
NextFeed = False
d = feedparser.parse( feed )
for entry in d.entries:
if entry.title in filetext:
NextFeed = True
else:
FILE = open( old_entries_file, "a" )
FILE.write( entry.title + "\n" )
FILE.close()
msgqueue.append( entry.title + " : " + entry.link )
if NextFeed:
break;
t = threading.Timer( 900.0, feed_refresh ) # TODO: make this static
t.start()

for channel in channel_list:
server.join( channel )

feed_refresh()

while 1:
while len(msgqueue) > 0:
msg = msgqueue.pop()
for channel in channel_list:
server.privmsg( channel, msg )
time.sleep(1) # TODO: Fix bad code
irc.process_once()
time.sleep(1) # So that we don't hog the CPU!


Forgive me for writing ugly code. I’m a newbie pythoner, and this is my first python script that actually does something useful.

On a side note, I attended a semi-classical concert by Anil Srinivasan (Piano), Unnikrishnan (Vocal), and B S Purushottaman (Kanjira), and it was one awesome experience. The auditorium (the Lady Andal School auditorium, where Margazhi Raagam was shot AFAIK) was simply superb. The ambience, and the stage lighting were amazing too. It was the confluence of the music of all three artistes, the auditorium and the lighting that created the paradise that we experienced.