How India figured out the science of sound 17 centuries before the West did

Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS

It looks like something you would carry water in: a round-bellied pot of baked clay, narrow-mouthed. Then the musician draws it against his bare stomach, lays his fingers on the clay, and the pot begins to speak.

A bass note that deepens as he presses the pot into his stomach, a clear high tone struck near the rim, and a fast flutter of fingers that races the beat and settles back upon it.

The vessel is singing, and there is no trick. The ghatam is the clay pot at the rhythmic heart of South Indian Carnatic music, fired in the Tamil Nadu town of Manamadurai from clay threaded with tiny shards of brass.

It carries a question the world took 2,000 years to answer: what kind of instrument is a singing pot?

It has no strings, no skin stretched across it like a drum. There is only the clay, the whole body of it trembling when the hand lands.

To know where it belongs, beside the bell, not the drum, you need a system for sorting every sound made.

The West built one, named after two Germans, and treats it as the origin of the science of sound.

But the logic at its heart was reasoned out in India 17 centuries earlier, written into a Sanskrit treatise called the Natya Shastra, and carried to Europe by an Indian scholar whose name the West forgot.

This article, the latest instalment of the Science of Sound series, is the story of who answered first. The next part will take up the German system that grew from this Indian foundation, and the science of why a raga moves us at all.

THE FOURFOLD ANSWER

Sometime between the first century before the Common Era and the second century after it, a scholar named Bharata Muni completed that treatise, a work so ambitious it still has no real equivalent.

It treats dance, drama, poetry, prosody, stagecraft and music as one science of performance, seven of its chapters on sound alone.

In Chapter 28, Bharata makes a claim of extraordinary nerve. Every musical instrument that exists or could ever exist, anywhere on Earth, can be sorted into four groups by the physical thing that vibrates to make the sound.

Four groups, he argues, are enough. Four are necessary. Four are complete.

The first, tata vadya, is sounded by a stretched, vibrating string. The veena, the sitar, the tanpura, and the violin are stringed instruments.

The second, sushira vadya, by a vibrating column of air. The flute, the shehnai, and the nadaswaram are wind instruments.

The third, ghana vadya, is a solid instrument of metal, stone, wood or fired clay that rings as a whole body. Cymbals, bells, manjira, ghatam, and ghoongroo are solid instruments.

The fourth, avanaddha vadya, is faced with a stretched membrane that beats when struck. The drum, the tabla, the dhol, and the mridangam are percussion instruments.

The ghatam, whose entire clay body vibrates when struck, is ghana vadya, akin not to the drum it sits beside on stage but to the bell.

There is a quiet marvel in that placement. The ghatam may once have been a drum: its earliest forms, some scholars believe, had a skin across the mouth, gone by the sixth century, after which the pot became a body that sings on its own.

A single instrument had crossed from one of Bharata’s classes into another, and his system catches that, because it never asks what an instrument is made of or called, only what, precisely, is vibrating.

Those four divisions map, almost without a seam, onto the four primary classes that modern museums and scholars still use, the Hornbostel-Sachs classification.

According to a paper published by the German musicologists Erich Moritz von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs in 1914 and translated into English in The Galpin Society Journal, Vol. 14, in March 1961, musical instruments can be divided into four classes: chordophones, aerophones, idiophones and membranophones.

Chordophones are stringed instruments, aerophones have a vibrating column of air, idiophones produce sounds through the vibration of the entire solid body, and membranophones have a stretched skin.

The Hornbostel-Sachs classification system arrived 17 centuries after Bharata, who devised the Natya Shastra not by sorting instruments by resemblance but by reasoning from physics.

The principle sounds almost too plain to be powerful. A string vibrates. A column of air vibrates. A solid body vibrates. A membrane vibrates. Acoustically, that exhausts the possibilities. Everything else is elaboration on one of those four events.

“All instruments, anywhere in the world, invariably come under one of these classifications,” musicologist and educationist Pappu Venugopala Rao renders directly from the music chapters of the Natya Shastra.

Two thousand years on, the claim holds. The only large thing modern organology, or the science of how we classify instruments, has added is a fifth class, electrophones, which carry sound through electronic circuitry.

This new class was folded in by the MIMO Consortium, a partnership of instrument museums, in 2011. A man writing before the Common Era can be forgiven for not anticipating the synthesiser.

What is so often missed is that the Natya Shastra was not idle speculation. It is full of working acoustics.

Bharata described measuring the 22 shrutis, the microtonal steps into which Indian music divides the octave.

A string makes sound by vibrating, and the faster it vibrates, the higher the pitch.

The number of vibrations per second is its frequency, and two strings are in tune when their frequencies match exactly, sounding as one. A shruti is the smallest difference in pitch the human ear can detect.

Imagine sliding orange toward red, shade by shade: the last point where you can still tell them apart is one shruti.

Bharata’s method was this, in sound: he tuned two identical veenas alike, then loosened one string by the tiniest amount, until the two stopped sounding unified, and the ear caught them as two notes.

That gap was the measurement. A note is what the ear hears when an object vibrates at one steady frequency, a regular wave rather than the chaotic jumble that makes noise.

So, plainly: pitch is the quality of highness or lowness of a sound, a tone is a smooth sound with a clear pitch, and a note is a named tone musicians build music from.

Both Indian and Western music name seven notes, Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Dha Ni and Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti, but these are just the main notes, and there are smaller steps hidden between them.

The West splits the octave into 12 of these small steps, while Indian classical music splits the very same stretch into 22 even finer ones called shrutis, the way a millimetre ruler sees distances a centimetre ruler misses.

Bharata gives a whole chapter to tala, the architecture of musical time, writing bluntly that a musician who does not know rhythm is fit neither to sing nor to play.

This was a civilisation measuring sound exactly, long before it owned any instrument but the ear.

THE SCHOLAR WHO SENT INDIA’S SOUND TO EUROPE

For most of the next 2,000 years, that knowledge stayed within the Sanskrit and regional traditions, refined by theorists such as Sarngadeva but rarely known to the world beyond India.

The man who changed that, and who belongs nearer the centre of this story than he is usually allowed, was the Bengali aristocrat and musicologist Sourindro Mohun Tagore.

According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which holds many of the instruments he sent into the world, he became one of the most determined ambassadors Indian music has ever had.

Born in Calcutta in 1840 into the Pathuriaghata branch of the Tagore family, he rendered the deep theory of Indian music into terms the 19th century West could read, without letting it pass as curiosity.

In 1875, he published, in Bengali with notes in English, the Yantra Kosha, a treasury of musical instruments and the first concise modern catalogue of its kind.

According to it, the fourfold scheme Indian theory had carried since Bharata held firm: tata, sushira, ghana and anaddha, which mean string, air, solid and membrane, respectively.

Then Tagore did something shrewder than publishing. He sent the instruments themselves abroad.

In 1876, a gift of close to a hundred Indian instruments reached the Musical Instruments Museum in Brussels. His books travelled with musical instruments, and the curator was commissioned to catalogue the collection.

So the curator held not only the objects but Tagore’s own framework for reading them.

The knowledge did not drift westward by accident. An Indian scholar exported it, with the theory needed to read it, at the very moment Europe was building the institutions that would define the field.

The politics of that moment matter, because science does not float free of it.

The great European instrument collections of the 19th century were assembled inside the machinery of the Belgian, British, French and other colonial enterprises, then carving up Africa and Asia, stocked in part with objects taken from colonised societies and shown as specimens of other people’s ingenuity.

Tagore worked inside that asymmetry and tried to bend it, using correspondence, gifts and relentless publication to place Indian musical science into European scholarship on his own terms.

That he survives as a footnote in most Western histories of organology, while the men who received his work supply the headline, is itself part of this series’s reason for being.

THE LOGIC EUROPE BORROWED

The curator in Brussels was Victor-Charles Mahillon, a Belgian instrument-maker and acoustician who in 1877 became the first head of what is now the Musical Instruments Museum, a collection that would grow past 4,000 instruments.

His difficulty was not acquiring them but arranging them. The system he settled on divided every instrument into four classes by the nature of the vibrating body, classes that were, in all but name, Bharata’s. Not a coincidence, but transmission.

The judgment is not this article’s alone.

Dr Arun M Kumar, who teaches engineering design at IIT Madras, tells IndiaToday.in that the Hornbostel-Sachs scheme “is on the lines of the Natya Sastra,” because Mahillon “classified the collection of thousands of musical instruments around the world using the Natya Sastra system that he learnt from S.M. Tagore’s books, particularly Yantra Kosh.”

The order the West came to treat as its own invention was, on this account, an Indian inheritance that went uncredited.

That single discipline is what made a real classification possible, where others had failed.

Ancient China sorted instruments by the eight materials of their making, placing a metal trumpet beside a metal bell while parting a bamboo flute from a bone one.

Europe, inheriting from Greece and Rome, split them loosely into strings, winds and percussion, confusing what vibrates with how it is played.

Bharata’s one question cut through all of it.

WHAT THE NUMBER CANNOT HOLD

There is a limit to all of this, and it is not a limit of physics, but of what a classification, however elegant, is built to see.

Return to the clay pot. Bharata would have called it ghana vadya, and rightly so.

But ask an engineer whether that label captures the ghatam, and the answer is a careful no.

The same is true of its cousin the mridangam, the two-headed Carnatic drum whose heads carry a loading of tuning paste, applied by hand, that forces the skin’s tuneless ring into an ordered, musical series, so the drum sings with the clarity of a string.

To call it a membrane sounder, says Dr Arun Kumar, “describes just the trigger mechanism, but it fails to describe the acoustic phenomena. It obscures the exquisite material science and structural engineering developed over centuries that forces a simple membrane to behave like a perfectly tuned, harmonic stringed instrument.”

The category is not wrong. It is narrow. It says nothing of the centuries of knowledge in the clay of that Manamadurai pot, the brass shards mixed into it, the curing of the wood, the proportioning of a drumhead, knowledge that lives in no system of names because it never lived in writing.

It lived in hands, and in another body of Sanskrit science which the West never folded into its story.

If the Natya Shastra taught how to classify an instrument, the Shilpa Shastras, the ancient treatises on arts and crafts, taught how to make one, codifying the working of wood, stone and metal a drum depends on.

And hands, unlike fired clay, do not last. Dr Savio Sebastian, who spent years in the laboratories of General Motors and General Electric before turning to acoustics at IIT Madras, has watched that knowledge thin out.

“Old artisans had a qualitative knowledge of wood behaviour, and they made the best use of that knowledge,” Dr Savio Sebastian tells IndiaToday.in. “Also, high quality wood was easily available, which is not so any more.”

The loss runs deeper than scarce wood.

Steel is easy to model because it behaves the same in every direction, Dr Sebastian explains, but wood never does: it changes with age, with how it is cut and cured, and differs along the grain and across it.

“It is intractably complex,” he says, and so the craftsperson’s trained hand could judge what no formula could capture.

A classification records what an instrument is. It has no column for whether anyone alive still knows how to make it.

That same gap, between what a sound is and what it means, runs through the way the music itself is written about.

Jaideep Giridhar, former editor of the music magazines Rave and Time Out, traces it to the desk it comes from.

“Most of the writing about this kind of music in the Indian press comes from the culture desk and not the science desk,” Jaideep Giridhar tells IndiaToday.in.

It is precisely that gap, between the culture desk and the science desk, that this series was built to close.

The habit that follows, he says, is to treat ragas as “self-contained vehicles for emotion,” so that “a so-called sad raga holds sadness within it.”

A raga is the melodic framework of Indian classical music, a set of notes and rules a musician improvises within, each tied by tradition to a mood.

The science behind this is humbler. “The juxtaposition of notes and timbre triggers these emotional responses in listeners,” Jaideep Giridhar says.

Timbre is the texture of a sound, which lets you tell a flute from a violin on the same note.

The feeling is not sealed inside the music; it is made in the person who hears it, so that, in the former music editor’s phrase, “the burden of manifestation is transferred to the receiver.”

And because it is assembled in the listener, it is not the same for everyone. “A raga that the aesthetic theory claims is sad,” Jaideep Giridhar says, “need not necessarily trigger sadness in every listener,” because the response is shaped by memory, by setting, by all a listener brings.

Why a particular arrangement of notes moves the brain at all belongs to another science, the subject of a later part of this series.

It is the same lesson Bharata’s system teaches in another key. The classification can tell you, with 2,000 years of authority, exactly what an instrument is.

What it means, the devotion it serves, the memory it carries, lives where no category follows: in the room, in the ritual, and in the listener.

THE SOUND WAS ALWAYS FIRST

Bharata understood this before Europe had a word for it. He looked at every instrument the world could make: a string, a reed, a bell, a drum, a clay pot, and saw beneath each only four ways for matter to speak.

He reasoned from the vibration itself, and reached an answer so complete that 2,000 years and a synthesiser later, it needed only one more category.

A Bengali scholar, working inside an empire that would forget his name, carried that answer abroad and set it down in Brussels, where the world would build its science on top of it without asking whose foundation it was.

The names on the system are German. The logic is older, and it is ours.

The clay pot still sings in the halls of the South, longer than the system that knows where to file it.

The classification came later. The sound came first.

The world learnt to name the sound. India had already learnt to listen.

– Ends

SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA