Today I wanted to blog about an important musical concept. Who else could be a better guest in this particular blog other than the theory of relativity guy - our own favorite - saakshaath Albert Einstein? And which ragam could be a better one to describe this illusive musical phenomenon other than our favorite pentatonic queen Mohanam?
And now you are stuck with seeing my face again in Youtube. Please click the video below to hear me play Mohana raagam! Since I used the Bansuri to play this and since I incorporated vilambit laya sans south Indian gamakas, let us call this as Raga Bhoopali (which is the north Indian equivalent for the south Indian Mohana raga).
And remember, my previous promise to you is still true! For each time you click to hear me play, I will send you $ 10.00! All that you have to do is email me your invoice! There you go! I will paypal you some dough from my Gandhi kanakku bank account!
Mohanam is a beautiful raga. Even the wind chime that you buy at Home Depot plays it so nicely without having any idea that it is playing a beautiful Audava-Audava raga. Audava means 5 notes - pentatonic! Audava-Audava means both the ascending and descending has 5 notes each. Sa Re Ga Pa Da Sa! Or, in western notation - C D E G A C! In my hexadecimal notation system I call Mohanam as 024790! I once again refer you to my copyrighted piano figure below to understand why I call Mohanam as 024790. I use this system of nomenclature for its simplicity sake - it removes the ambiguity of the "sharp" and "flat" notes.
And now - talking about the main subject of this blog - that the visual and auditory perception are analyzed so differently by our intellect! Let us look at light perception. You can't see light below 400 nm (infrared). And visible spectrum starts at 400 nm. Your brain perceives this light - 400 nm - as "red light". That is true for all the humans. As soon as light is decoded by the visual cortex, the intellect stamps the "red" label on such a light that has a frequency of 400 nm. It is not like Indians see 400 nm as "red" while Chinese would look at the same as green! 400 nm is pretty red for all of humans, whether we are white, black, brown or yellow! And similarly the perception of a 700 nm light is "seen" as "violet" by the intellect. Thus there is a clear branding by the brain about what color is a particular frequency of light.
But in the auditory realm, the same thing of "light perception logic" don't hold true. Mother Nature decided to show you her caprice here! How dare you try to apply the logic of one known system to another system that you are trying to elucidate, you silly little mortal human! Can you ever decode Mother Nature! There she is, Mother Nature, laughing hysterically showing you her middle finger!
In visual perception, red is red whether it is next to green or blue. But in auditory perception, things are not absolute anymore, it is all just very relative! So, let us look at the auditory perception! Human ear is capable of hearing between 20 Hz to 20000 Hz. Mother nature doesn't brand sound waves as they pass through the auditory cortex just like the way she brands light waves! There is no branding of "Sa" or "Re" notes as the waves pass through the intellect. The psychoacoustic perception is a very relative phenomenon - you perceive one note only in relationship to the adjacent note and not by the absolute value of the solitary note alone! In fact in music perception, brain never finds joy in the notes themselves! What matters is the frequency distance between the notes and not the notes themselves. The joy of music is in listening to the various tonal patterns and not in the tones themselves!
Play a 261.62 Hz frequency note (which is the note middle C, by the way) and let us see what the heck the brain does! It cares a damn! Really! Try it! But then, as an experiment, play the 261.62 Hz frequency first and then successively play 293.66 Hz (which is note middle D), and then 329.62 Hz (which is note middle E), and now the brain begins to wonder if you are playing the Sa Re Ga of Mohana raga! So, when you are playing the raga Mohanam - 024790 - the brain never looks at the absolute notes as mentioned above! What matters is just the difference between the notes! So, all that the brain cares about is the pattern of tonal differences between various notes - and thus in this example, 22323 is the the tonal pattern that creates the "music of raga Mohanam"! I arrived at 22323 as the pattern representing raga Mohanam because the Sa and Re of mohanam are separated by 2 semitones, then Re and Ga are separated by 2 semitones and then between Ga and Pa separated by 3 semitones and so forth making "22323".
It is unbelievable how the theory of relativity applies in various aspects of our life. My parents see me as a son, my aunt sees me as a nephew, my daughter sees me as a father and my wife sees me as a lover (I could have said husband but the word "lover" gave me a little bit of a kick!). So, look at the various avatars that we all have in this world! It is like the photograph of your house that looks so different from the front, and the sides and the back! Unless you have been to that house and know it well, you may not even associate the picture of the front of a house to the picture of the back of the house and realize that they both are of the same house! It is all just different perspectives of the same thing, isn't it?
Look how tonal pattern that makes the raga Mohanam (22323) takes various dimensions based on how you look at it:
22323 equals raga Mohanam!
23232 equals raga Madhyamavathi (looking at Mohanam from Re Ga Pa Da Sa Re)
32322 equals raga Hindolam (looking at Mohanam from Ga Pa Da Sa Re Ga)
23223 equals raga Suddha Saveri (looking at Mohanam from Pa Da Sa Re Ga Pa)
32232 equals raga Suddha Dhanyasi (looking at Mohanam from Da Sa Re Ga Pa Da).
When I concluded my Bansuri alapana in the above Youtube video, the short vocal alapana that I did was raga Nagaswaravali - Sa Ga Ma Pa Da Sa (045790). The tonal pattern for raga Nagaswarali is 41223. Why don't you look at that pattern in various ways - example "12234" or "22341" or "23412" or "34122" and see what other ragas you get out of it! That would be a good exercise on your keyboard!
And by the way, when Einstein came to my home to visit me, he appeared to be a little disappointed in me for wearing the same Kurta Jeans in my four Youtube videos that I have posted so far. He also told me that I should consider hair transplant before posting stuff on Youtube!
Einstein sir, don't you know that pulchritude possesses solely cutaneous profundity? Anyway, I do agree with you regarding changing the Kurta Jeans in my next video! Until next time, cheers and see you again!
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