Recent writing in the field of ethnomusicology has re-asked the question of “what is music?”. Christopher Small coined the term “musicking”, which to me expresses that there is no such thing as “music” that is apart from the act of “musicking”. Music and mathematics have shared a historical bond with each other - with mathematicians finding fascination in musical patterns and musicians relishing in artistic construction using mathematical patterns, more recently involving computational patterns. The relationship that both these activities bear to the functioning of human cognition also share great similarities. Mathematicians have long declared the activity of “doing mathematics” as a creative process that is not steeped in certainties, as a naive view of mathematics might suppose. Paralleling that, musicians also often demonstrate intellectualization of the activity of musicking that resembles a mathematical theory of the constructs that they are building. In consideration of such deep connections, in this essay, I explore the parallel thesis - there is no such thing as mathematics, there is only mathematicking - and where I name the joint activity “mathemusicking”.

Was it Gandhiji who said “Be the change you want to see in the world”?

There are quite a few things about Chennai traffic that I would like to see change … and where better to begin than with myself?

In my previous post, I explored how programming with promises can be made close to programming with values. After some more work on it, and some learning from bluebird, I came to conclude that my brain doesn’t think well with promises. So I wrote a macro for Javascript that expands “tasks” into async state machines that communicate using channels (i.e. CSP). I want to talk about the specific options for error management implemented in the task macro.

Promises are the new old thing in the land of Javascript async abstractions, though they aren’t as good as CSP-style channels for async programming. In this post, I describe a channel implementation based on promises that attempts to bring some CSP-style programming abilities into the JS world … now, instead of in ES6.

In part-2 of How to Practice Carnatic Music with a Metronome, I described some beginning exercises for the vina that combine meditation with practice of basic right hand plucking techniques that need early mastery. I described five such exercises for anchoring the flow of musical time in the body through breathing.

One problem with having so many exercises is that it isn’t clear to beginner students which one to pick that’s right for them .. and, to be fair, neither did I have a clear idea of which one would be good for beginners – if I were to pick one. Now that some time has passed since I came up with those exercises and some students have had the chance to try them out, I do have a better idea and I can suggest one.

Status: Draft

In part-1 and part-2, I covered some very basic techniques for “anchoring time in the body”. In this part, I illustrate a technique for practice that I call “role inversion” with a pallavi as an example.

Status: Draft

Part 1 presented internalizing “layam” or musical time as the practice goal for working with a metronome. In the course of teaching vina, I realized that practice with a metronome already requires a sense of time and if this has not been nurtured initially, it can lead to an aversion to practicing with one to gain mastery over time and an unhealthy reliance on it, even if warned as I did with Part 1.

Internalizing the flow of musical time, known as “layam”, is an essential aspect of the training of a student of Carnatic music. Though the adage “sruti mata, laya pitah” (“pitch is the mother and time is the father”) is oft repeated, what we find in practice is that a reference for the sruti (tonic) is recommended for and always used by even beginner students, but a comparable reference for time in the form of a metronome is almost never seen.

Here’s something fun done in Tala Keeper - a walk through of Nine Nadais in one big 36 beat cycle. If you’re viewing this on your iOS device, tapping that link will open it in Tala Keeper. If not, the pattern will play in another browser window in the free HTML5 simulator.