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Compiling real-world examples of music in different scales, ranging from the famous to the abstruse. Expand your aural horizons with fresh sounds and sequences!

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Overview & Design | Ethos & Principles | Feedback & Future

• Music in Scales: Home •

—What is ‘Music in Scales’?—

Hindustani raga is music’s ultimate ‘interconnected form’: combining everything from melodic and geometric vocabulary to deep cultural, historical, and spiritual associations, while remaining irreducible to any single one of these dimensions. This project is an open-ended attempt to illuminate the fullness of raga, aimed at sharing these unique joys with any who seek to learn more – and also an effort to connect distinctly Subcontinental ideas to a wide range of global sonic traditions.

 

This is an avowedly non-commercial project: high-quality raga information should be open to all, regardless of financial fortune – and must also remain free from the visual and spiritual pollution of advertising and corporate motive. All resources here will stay 100% open-access & ad-free: who am I to hide this shared human knowledge behind a paywall? To support this work, you can donate, try some online lessons, or…

[Join my PATREON!]

—Project Resources—

• Ethos & Principles •

Some guiding principles behind the project…

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• Interconnect everything! Detailed hyperlinking allows you to ‘choose your own adventure’ through the project – bringing a more intuitive, ‘mind-like’ navigability to the learning process than any book, video, or academic journal could offer (just follow whichever link-chains look most enticing…). I believe this ‘multi-modal fluidity’ is vital to raga itself: in the words of Parveen Sultana, “Each raga is a mirror of all Hindustani music…”

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• Primacy of ‘shape-metaphor’: European stave notation – which often goes unchallenged as the ‘default’ mode of intercultural sonic translation – is ill-suited to the nuances of raga. Instead, I use ‘swara wheels‘ to illustrate ‘melodic shapes’: apart from being the cognitively strongest mnemonic method, ‘shape learning’ is also much less culturally specific than the stave (still, geometry is always illustrative rather than prescriptive…).

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• Truly global connections: To further the quest of ‘de-centering’ Western modes of musicological study, I seek to compare and contrast raga concepts in multiple geographic directions (e.g. ‘murchanas‘ in maqam & gamelan, ‘tala‘ in flamenco & Ewe polyrhythm, and the ‘base scales‘ of Europe & Japan – as well as Carnatic and jazz ‘transliterations’ for all 300+ ragas).

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• Don’t tell anyone how to feel: While the Sanskrit conception of ‘rasa association’ (‘taste, flavour, emotional essence’) remains indispensable to modern raga, it is not a prescriptive guide to how any particular listener ‘should’ feel. Emotional responses to music vary wildly according to everything from the individual’s entire lifetime of cultural and social experience to whether they’ve had a good night’s sleep – as well as the time and place of hearing. I showcase multiple reactions, and generally try to favour ‘quasi-objective’ descriptors (‘clustered’, ‘winding’, ‘energetic’) over ‘mood words’ (‘sad’, ‘joyful’, ‘reassuring’).

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• Messy meta-musicology: Instead of just presenting the ‘results’ of my research, I want to lay bare some of the real-world joys, frustrations, challenges, and mundanities behind actually doing it – ranging from my own mis-steps and misunderstandings to the practical tribulations of tuning Hindustani instruments in a British climate (also see my fortuitous path to solving John Coltrane’s ‘Scales of India’ mystery).

—Bhatkhande Lecture (Ashok Da Ranade)—

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“The phenomenon of raga reflects the special genius of Indian society for balancing continuity with change, conformity with individuality, and discipline within creativity. When manifested in a specific artistic expression…the aesthetic experience enjoys the benefits of familiarity along with novelty. But this is an open-ended historical process, with no predetermined destination – so the tradition accepts that, in time, everything changes…” (Deepak Raja)

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• Future Plans & Feedback •

Perpetually improving the project…

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As of early 2024, all the ‘core pages’ of the Raga Index are now live: including a Glossary, a multi-modal Tagging system, ‘explainers’ on key concepts (Thaat, Tala, Murchana) and interlinked resources (Ragatable, Tanpuras, Quotes), as well as in-depth explorations of 40 idiosyncratic ragas, and melodic summaries of over 300 more.

 

As mentioned above, this project will perpetually expand. Now these core resources have been published, the central plan for ‘phase two’ focuses much more on seeking direct input from artists, scholars, and listeners – in order to robustly challenge and radically enhance the information already presented, and also to help guide the future directions of the project. Specific next steps include:

• Publishing more raga profiles, and building on current pages
• Fresh information via an extensive artist and listener survey
• Integration of new analytic tools (e.g. PRAAT pitch-mapping)
• Writing up my solution to the puzzle of Coltrane’s raga scales
• Expansions and corrections via artist and audience feedback

Inevitably, non-commercial passion projects do not pay the bills. My site – which will always remain 100% ad-free, un-paywalled, and free from corporate influence – is intended as a perpetual haven from these tiresome pollutants. I put as much into the Raga Index as time and finances allow – so if you want to hasten the expansion of these resources, and further the mission of open-access global musicology, you can:

• Support the Raga Index! •

Also consider trying out some raga lessons, hiring me to write or record, or just sharing your own feedback on the project!

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“The dense interactions between vibration, perception, and emotion are not yet well understood…While music can, in many respects, function as a truly universal language, it is still an unpredictable and highly subjective mode of emotional transmission: after all, you can never really know what the person sitting next to you at a concert is really experiencing – or, indeed, quite how you’ll feel the next time you put on a well-worn old record…” (from my Coltrane’s Ragas project)

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—Who am I to be doing this?—

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Naturally, this project did not just pour forth from my own head. I’m much more like a ‘database admin’, seeking to synthesise the best of existing raga scholarship, and gather fresh knowledge from today’s artists, theorists, and listeners – before usefully organising and presenting it. While I am a dedicated, long-term student of sitar, santoor, and tabla, I lay zero claim to being an expert performer on any of these instruments (…having focused far more on playing ragas on guitars). More than anything, the foundations of this project are built on the generous, first-hand input of top-tier raga practitioners themselves.

 

I draw on an odd range of raga-relevant immersions: having most recently been Darbar Festival‘s resident musicologist for two years, tasked with demystifying raga for a global audience. Aged 18-19 I lived in Benares, studying sitar & tabla under Pandit Shivnath Mishra, then picked up the santoor a few years later (after sport-related arm injuries left me unable to handle anything more vigorous for a while). I’ve since written about raga for The Wire, Jazzwise, Ragatip, & Guitar World, and in 2022 received acclaim for my ‘World of Tuning‘ project (a systematic survey of global guitar tunings: see video below). I currently teach music in South London schools, as well as giving performances and workshops – and my ‘raga trio’ composition for the ZeroClassikal label will be released in 2024 (in Bageshri & Vachaspati). Some raga-themed writings:

• Darbar Festival: ’21 articles for 21st-century Indian music’
• Ragatip South Asia series: Classical, folk, fusions, & more
• Fresh Repertoire: New fretboard ideas via disparate traditions
• Coltrane’s Ragas: Solving the puzzle of his ‘Scales of India’ notes
• Other writings: Essays, reviews, interviews, compositions, etc

–The ‘World of Tuning’ (2022)–

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“There’s perhaps no better guide to alternate tunings than George Howlett’s World Of Tuning: with its compendium of 100 tunings, each helpfully accompanied by recorded samples, details on the intervallic relationships between the strings, and bios of the guitarists who invented or popularised them…” (The Wire: Unofficial Channels, Aug 2022)

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• Project Contributors •

Full list of direct contributors & corresponders (n.b. inclusion here doesn’t mean someone endorses all my analysis! Feedback always welcome…)

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• Get in touch! •

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