iSargam: music notation representation for Indian Carnatic music

Abstract

Indian classical music, including its two varieties, Carnatic and Hindustani music, has a rich music tradition and enjoys a wide audience from various parts of the world. The Carnatic music which is more popular in South India still continues to be uninfluenced by other music traditions and is one of the purest forms of Indian music. Like other music traditions, Carnatic music also has developed its musicography, out of which, a notation system called Sargam is most commonly practiced. This paper deals with development of a music representation or encoding system for the Sargam notation scheme which enables easy music notation storage, publishing, and retrieval using computers. This work follows a novel idea of developing a Unicode-based encoding logic and allows storage and easy retrieval of music notation files in a computer. As opposed to many existing music representation systems for western music notation, iSargam is the only music notation encoding system developed for Indian music notation.