Arun’s (mostly carnatic) World

Introduced in version 1.1, the Carnatic Music Notation Typesetter allows you to notate songs that switch their gati or naDai (gait) in the middle. The directive for this is Gati.

Note: This feature actually has been in the typesetter for quite a while now, and so it was sort of an “undocumented” feature until now.

A brief explanation about the role of gati
The gati is one of the factors that determines how many swaras or notes would fit within an akshara, the other factor being “speed” i.e. whether the swara is in first speed or second speed or third speed. You may recall that in the typesetter, the speed is indicated as a number i.e 0, 1, 2 etc. In the Typesetter lingo, irrespective of the gati, for speed = 0, you have exactly one swara per akshara. In other words, a swara with a speed setting of 0 is as long as an akshara’s duration. For higher speeds, you will have gati come into play. For speed = 1, you can have 2 swaras per akshara for catusra gati; 3 swaras per akshara for tisra gati; 5 for khaNDa gati; 7 for miSra gati and 9 for sankIrNa gati. For speed = 2, the # of swaras per akshara simply double – thus 4 catusra, 6 for tisra, 10 for khaNDa, 14 for miSra and 18 for sankIrNa. For the next speed, the # of swaras again double.

The Gati Directive
Thus there five different gatis in carnatic music: the ubiquitous catusra, tiSra, khaNDa, miSra, sankIrNa. The default gati in the typesetter is catusra unless you are using a tala like Tisra Gati Adi.

To switch the gati of a song, you use the Gati directive. For example:

Gati: tisra

switches the subsequent notation to tisra gati. The valid values for the gati are tisra, catusra, khanda, misra and sankirna (case insensitive).

Gati switches can at the start of an akshara and thus can be at the following:

• start of a tala cycle i.e. avarthanam.
• start of a tala anga within a tala cycle.
• start of an akshara within a tala anga.

Here is a contrived example demonstrating gati switches. The input is as follows:

Here is the screen shot of output manually annotated with gati indicators. Note that the Varnam layout allows us to see the # of swaras per akshara clearly for the speed setting of 1.

Caveats
For the same default speed (i.e. 0 1 2 ), tisram here packs more swaras than catusra, which is unexpected and does not match with the natural usage. For example, in the above example, we have s r in catusram but s r g in tisram. Similarly if our current speed were 2 i.e. four swaras per akshara in catusram, then when we switch to tisram, we get 6 swaras (i.e. goes to tisram mel kalam). Typically in songs, when we switch from catusra to tisra in the same singing/playing speed, we switch from 4 swaras per akshara to 3 swaras per akshara This is mainly because the typesetter usage of the speed does not map map as-is to how speed is used in practice.One way to get around this and achieve a switch of four swaras per akshara in catusra gati to three swaras per akshara in tisra gati (speed = 2 here) is by using the special __ (two underscores) indicator to “blank out” half the swaras. This is illustrated in the following example:

The usage of __ (two underscores) to blank out swaras is admittedly less than an ideal solution, but it works.

The Unified Transliteration Scheme for Carnatic Music Compositions and the Transliterator web application are now at Release 1.1. This release has the following enhancements:

• Tamil can (optionally) use the character for Sa (as in Siva, Sakthi), which allows for a fairer representation of the sound compared to the earlier (with qualifiers) or (no qualifiers). Your system must meet certain requirements in order to make use of this. Please refer to this page for more information.
• The transliteration scheme now supports an explicit specifier s2 for using the character in Tamil for the sa phoneme. Note that for other languages, both sa and s2a are equivalent and map to the sa phoneme.

Transliterator v1.1 new features

• Users can now ask the transliterator to use the character in Tamil as mentioned above – check the Use Grantha Sa checkbox in the Tamil tab.
• Users can now ask the transliterator to use specific fonts for the various languages. Click on the Fonts… button (bottom-left).

Both the Carnatic Music Notation Typesetter and the Carnatic Music Transliterator now provide a way to make Tamil text use the grantha Sa character i.e. . This character, while not as widely accepted in Tamil, is nevertheless common in Tamil books (e.g. music books, religious books) that need to represent non-Tamil sources. It is a fairer representation of the Sa phoneme (as in Siva, Sakti) compared to /, since the really represents the sa sound (as in samam).

Both applications now do support this character. However for reasons explained below, it is not enabled by default.

System support for character – not ubiquitous
The character was added to Unicode fairly recently(in 2006) and hence it is supported only in a few systems at this time. So the control for requesting the use of this character is left to the end-user (see below). You should request it only if your system supports this character. The current known configurations in which this character are as follows:

• On Microsoft Vista, there is support at the system level for this character. The Latha font that is part of the OS supports this font. The system support is by the Unicode rendering engine called Uniscribe, which is in the dll usp10.dll. The version of the dll that ships with Vista has this support
• On Microsoft XP, if Office 2007 is installed then the Unicode rendering engine that is part of the Office 2007 at this time. However, the rendering engine that is in use for the rest of the system is an older version and does not support it. To make e.g. the FireFox or the Opera browser to use the Office 2007’s rendering engine, find the usp10.dll under the Office 2007 installation directory tree, and copy the it into into the FireFox, Opera installation directory.
  • You would still need a Unicode font that supports the character. One such font is Code2000, which is a shareware font available for download at www.code2000.net.

Enabling support for

• Carnatic Music Notation Typesetter: Support can be enabled by specifying the new granthasa attribute in the Language directive. You can specify this by checking the Use Grantha Sa checkbox in the Assist dialog for the Language directive.
• Carnatic Music Transliterator: Under the Tamil tab, there is now a checkbox for enabling use of Grantha sa

Version 1.1 of the Carnatic Music Notation Typesetter is now released. This release contains some new features, and a few bug fixes.

New Features:
The following new features were added for version v1.1:

• A new directive Gati, which allows you to switch the gati/naDai/gait of the song being notated. Please refer to this page for more information
• Enhancements to the PhraseEnds directive
  • Allow for the phrase endings to be shown in various styles. In addition to the already supported hyphens, they can be shown as “handles”.
  • You can now make the typesetter introduce trailing space after the phrase endings so that the individual phrases are prominently separated from each other for clarity. The amount of space to be given is also controllable.
• Notations in Tamil can (optionally) use the character for Sa (as in Siva, Sakthi), which allows for a fairer representation of the sound compared to the earlier (with qualifiers) or (no qualifiers). Note however that your system must meet certain requirements in order to make use of this. Please refer to this page for more information.
  • The transliteration scheme now also supports an explicit specifier for using the character for the sa sound. It is S2
• Enhancements to the Language Directive and also language specifier in Heading attributes
  • Control over how to display the Sa sound in Tamil.
  • Control over the size of the qualifier

Please refer to the manual for more information on these new features.

Bug Fixes/Other

• The PDF Manual now has bookmarks for easy access to various sections.
  • Each chapter about a directive also includes a Revision history section outlining the changes/enhancements across various releases.
• Fixed phrase endings display in IE. Previously the swara at the phrase end used to be shifted down.
• Phrase endings can be specified for a swara with a label of “-” (i.e. alternate representation of continuation). Previously — was rejected – now it is accepted as a phrase-end at a continuation swara.
• Notations that “run off” beyond the width of the display area are no longer forcibly clipped by the typesetter. Instead the control is left to the browser’s page setup and printing. Since the typesetter being a web-app never really can have absolute control over page setup, it was felt that forcible clipping was undesirable.

(Note: Release v1.2 of the Carnatic Music Transliterator released on Apr 04, 2008)

The Carnatic Music Transliterator is a web application which runs inside your browser (FireFox, IE, Safari, Opera) and allows you to print lyrics for carnatic music songs in Tamil, Telugu, Sanskrit and Kannada, besides English of course.

The primary goals of the application are

1. Aid fans and practioneers of carnatic music to grasp the pronunciation of compositions as accurately as possible.
2. Enable those carnatic music fans to view the text of the compositions in any of the target Indic languages. The assumption is that many Carnatic Music fans and practitioners may relate better to lyrics represented in their native language even for compositions in a different language.

The application is actually an editor, and allows you to specify the sahitya i.e. lyrics with formatting such as bold, italic, headings, colors etc. The lyrics are to be specified in English, and following the Unified Transliteration Scheme for Carnatic Compositions.

Once you have your text ready, you click one button and it will render the text in your favorite Carnatic Music language. You can also switch to a printable view of the translation of any particular language and then print it.

The transliterator also allows you to paste text that is already in the target languages. So if you see lyrics on some other web-page that is in Devanagiri, and want to see it in Tamil, Kannada or Telugu, simply copy the text and paste it to the editor and hit the translate button!

(Note: A new release Release v1.4 of the Carnatic Music Notation Typesetter released on Feb 21, 2008 with support for all 35 talas in catusra gati)

The Carnatic Music Notation Typesetter is a web-based application that allows you to typeset high quality notation sheets for carnatic music. It can generate notations in English, and if appropriate fonts are installed on your computer, it can even generate notation sheets in the following Indic languages: Sanskrit, Telugu, Tamil and Kannada.

The typesetter requires you to specify the notation for the song to be notated in a specific input format that is simple, and easy to use. The application converts the input into a graphical layout similar to those you see in carnatic music books .

The typesetter application currently is in Beta Release, which means it has some rough edges, and may not always be stable.

• To know more about using the typesetter, please read the manual, and also look at the Examples.
• To use this program effectively, you need to learn about how to specify the notation input. The Manual explains this in detail, and the examples are also a great way of learning how to specify Carnatic Music notations.
• Launch! the application.

Browser Support: Firefox is currently the preferred browser to run the typsetter. However, typesetter should work on Internet Explorer and Opera. As indicated above, due to the typesetter being in Beta release, you may still run into problems on these browsers. It is the intention of the author(s) to support the typesetter on Firefox, Opera, IE and Safari (on Mac).