Students of Carnatic music can recognize the joy in maintaining their collections of musical notations they have acquired and learnt over the years. Those “notations” from several patantharas stand as a testament to the Asura Sadhakam they have endured in the pursuit of mastery (which remains ever elusive) over their musical passion - be it Vocal music, Violin, Veena, Venu, Mrudangam and so on. The darker side of this is sadly the burden of care and carry!
I will always be proud of the shelves of musical books spanning early Geethams, to Varnams to Rare Krithis to what ever the next set of enigmatic notations I will be procuring on the next visit to the motherland of Carnatic music. Yet as a software engineer and a programming tools nerd I have had an itch left unscratched for a very long time!
For over 20 years I had been trying to transcribe notation on plain text files to prevent the fate of tattered pages for my musical books. However I had actively avoided building tooling around this - Especially for composing, type-setting and more importantly “transforming” musical notation for the purposes of teaching more advanced techniques to students (like different Kalaas and Nadais for Varnams and Pallavis). Earlier this year I finally caved in and began the Notations project. I had started with a very humble purpose - to provide a very simple musical typesetting system. Surprisingly it has since morphed into a few (what I find are) very exciting areas - parsing techniques, projectional editing and more.
If you are a student of carnatic music or a connoisseur or a programming languages enthusiast or a musical synthesis person or any combination of these there will be something here for you. I will be sharing more of the details of the inner workings of Notations as well as sharing new features over time. The source code for notations itself will be eventually open sourced.
Last but not least I recognize there are existing systems out there, like Arun’s Carnatic Music Notation Type Setter and Patantara. These are quite amazing on their own right. But the carnatic world could always use more tools with newer ideas and innovation!