Introducing Yourself to Indian Classical Music 10-The Saptaswaras or Saptak and What Lies in Between

Now, though it’s just been said in the last two posts that the saptak (octave) or seven notes are divided into 12 in the Hindustani system, musicians and teachers will tell you, that there is more than one form of Komal Rishabh, three forms of Komal Dhaivat etc.

That would, of course, make more than 12 tones in the octave.

The division of the seven notes into 12 tones is thus just a starting point or a point of reference.

This is because we have microtonal variations of notes in Indian music and they can make all the difference to how a raga sounds.

For example, two different ragas (just think of a raga as a melodic structure for the moment) may both have Komal Rishabh (Re)as part of their melodic make-up, but the approach to this semitone may be slightly different in each of these ragas, giving the sound of Komal Rishabh in each of these ragas a different quality.

It’s like using colour pencils to shade the same colour slightly differently.

For example, Komal Rishabh in the Raga Marwa is higher, nearer Shuddha Rishabh (look at the list of 12 tones in the post below if you can’t remember the names of the tones).

Komal Rishabh can also be intoned very close to the Shadja or Sa. Bhairav is an example of a raga where Komal Rishabh has this property of being closer to Sa.

We cannot represent microtonal variations on a keyboard, though the human voice and stringed instruments can reproduce them.

This is the reason why it is said we have seen the development of stringed instruments in India, as opposed to keyboard instruments.

The harmonium is a much later introduction and there has always been some controversy about it.

Though notation exists in Indian music, for the most part, one learns how to recognise and reproduce these tonal differences via the ear-by listening and with practice.

Tonal variations in Indian music are known as srutis. They are tiny variations that exist between the whole tones and semi-tones.

A note on the word sruti: The word sruti has variously been translated as microtone, tone, pitch, interval and frequency. Just think of a sruti as a variation of a note/tone to make things easy.

Indian music traditionally recognises not just 12 tones in an octave, but 22 tones or 22 srutis. Others say that the number of tones in an octave are infinite, but those that can be perceived by the human ear are 22.

Various techniques are used to ornament notes with microtonal variations. These ornamentations are known as gamaka, meend etc. We will talk more about these later.

Have you noticed that when an Indian classical musician sings it sounds as if her voice flowing, gliding, (even shaking) rather than hitting notes in a straight pin-pointed fashion? It’s because of the use of gamakas and meends that involve microtones. It sounds like the notes have been pulled and stretched.

Buddy left a link to a video in a previous post that illustrates this nicely.