Staff Notation/Score for Dharbar Varnam

[raguanu]

Hello all,

I've created a score for Dharbar Varnam "Chalamela" in Adi Thalam in western staff notation.

Preview:



Download PDF - http://beautifulnote.com/blog/wp-conten ... varnam.pdf

It's part of a necessity and an experiment. I've written about this score and my thoughts on writing down our music in this blog post (in Tamil):
http://endoflist.blogspot.com/2010/03/d ... score.html

Will post here with more details. Meanwhile, please try my score share your opinions.

Cheers,
Ananth

[vasanthakokilam]

Good work Ananth. I will check the links you provided. Just recently, I was curious about how to properly represent swaras that flow over a beat or anga boundary and I see a few examples of that in your staff notation.

Can you put such a thing together for Raghu vamsa sudha and niravadhi sugadha when you have some time?

Also, it will be good to have a side by side compare and contrast this notation with the usual CM notation of four swaras to a beat. Mohan has a font system to represent notation like that. Just for educational purposes.

Good work, thanks.

[raguanu]

Also, it will be good to have a side by side compare and contrast this notation with the usual CM notation of four swaras to a beat. Mohan has a font system to represent notation like that. Just for educational purposes.

The score is typeset using Lilypond. In many places I departed from regular 4-note grouping for the sake of phrasing. Number of aksharas in a bars will be totally accurate, though.

This is the general purpose score for this varnam. The code can be easily modified to show regular 4-4 note grouping in western score, or put a small "|" at every beat to show the rhythm, add instrument specific fingerings, transpose to different key (kattai) or different speed (2nd kalam, Trisram...), add an annotation track (ga ga ri sa => r-rmr r-rmrm ri sa). Possibilities are limitless.

Regarding the scores for other compositions, I'm typesetting other Adi Thala varnams right now. I'm also trying to tweak Lilypond so we can input carnatic score in a more familiar manner - inputting sa ri ga ma directly, instead of calculating c d e f . Once the workflow is simple enough, I'll post here.

I'm curious to try out the mentioned font system by Mohan. Please let me know where I can find it. Will be strictly educational purposes.

[vasanthakokilam]

Here are some references. In this thread: http://www.rasikas.org/forums/viewtopic. ... nt#p122992

Mohan has provided the location to get his fonts: http://www.carnaticcorner.com/fonts/carnatic-fonts.zip

Arun has developed a full fledged CM typesetting system for the traditional notation : http://arunk.freepgs.com/wordpress/cm-typesetter/about/

May be you three can collaborate and develop a way to go from one notation to the other. That will be useful and awesome.

Arun and Mohan hopefully will see this thread and participate.

[raguanu]

Thanks Vasanthakokilam.

I've tried Arun's CM Typesetter. It's awesome, especially when switching between languages. However, I'm looking for a more tweakable output; annotations, fingerings, phrasing, gamaka symbols ... CM Typesetter draws HTML table (then to pdf). SVG or Latex output will be more useful for such tweaks.

My brother and I are working on a project similar to that of arun's, but it will product svg output, which can be opened in inkscape for further edits. (Ruby code. Will open source. Not under very active development, just some basic ideas. Developers welcome)

Lilypond's ability to typeset music beautifully; spacing between the notes etc., is quite amazing. I wonder if we could borrow some of these aspects into our notation system. I even once attempted to make lillypond to produce carnatic score without staff notation, with limited success.

Cheers,
Ananth