Indian music expert shares knowledge with UOW

May 17, 2006

An expert in Indian music and musical instruments visited the University of Wollongong last week as part of an Innovation Week event presented by the Faculty of Arts’ Sonic Arts Research Network.

Director of Research at the National Centre for Performing Arts in Mumbai, Dr Suvarnalata Rao, is an active performer and scholar with expertise in computational musicology and organology and a long time student of sitar master Pandit Arvind Parikh.

She was the keynote speaker at Sonic Connections -- a one-day symposium with three concerts that focused on music in alternative tuning systems and music for purpose-built instruments both electronic as well as non-electronic.

The focus of this year's Sonic Connections was microtonal music - music based on unfamiliar musical scales. Western music is based on the 12-tone chromatic scale and its diatonic subsets and any pitches that lie outside these familiar category boundaries are perceived as 'out of tune'. The term microtonal music is also used to refer to any music whose tuning is not based on equally spaced semitones, such as western just intonation, Indonesian gamelan music and Indian classical music.

Like early western music prior to the development of the modern equal tempered keyboard, Indian music theory is based on a sophisticated system of 22 microtones that give the music its rich, distinctive character.

Dr Rao spoke about her research which has identified a problem that currently faces traditional musicians in India -- the viability of India's musical tradition which is under threat because traditional handicraft skills required for making Indian musical instruments are rapidly being lost.

After the symposium, Dr Rao met with several experts in the Faculty of Informatics and Creative Arts to discuss strategies for future research collaboration to address this problem.

Sonic Connections 2006 was also the culmination of a 3-year ARC Discovery project based on tuning systems. The ARC Discovery Project entitled 'Pocket Gamelan: tuning musical applications for wireless internet' began in 2003 and finished in 2005.

It was focused on developing applications that allow composers and musicians to explore the world of microtonality using mobile phone technology. The prototype of some of these applications were presented at the final concert in Sonic Connections in a performance directed by Ms Janys Hayes, lecturer in theatre, at the University Recreation and Aquatic Centre.

Here, mobile phones were used to perform music in microtonal scales, one created by 8th century Islamic theorist Al-Farabi, the other by contemporary tuning theorist, Erv Wilson. The works entitled 'Mandala 3' and 'Mandala 4' will also be presented at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, on June 8th, as part of the New Interfaces for Musical Expression conference. These works were among 20 recently chosen by an international from a field of 150 to be presented at the premiere event for innovative musical instrument designs.