Poorvanga and Uttaranga name the two halves of the saptak. The terms sound like vocabulary, but they decide which half of the octave a raga lives in, and that is one of the things that separates two ragas built from the same notes. The Saptak Folds in Half Take the second half of the scale and listen to it on its own terms. If you imagine the Pa as a Sa, then Pa Dha Ni Sa sounds like Sa Re Ga Ma all over again — because each of those notes has exactly the same relationship to

If you have tuned a bansuri against an app, or bought a flute from a maker who tunes chromatically, you may have run into something that makes no sense. The tuner says the note is right. Your ear says it is not. And a well-tuned tanpura agrees with your ear. Nobody is malfunctioning. The two systems genuinely disagree, and the previous post — on shruti and cents — gives us the vocabulary to say by exactly how much. What Tempering Actually Does In the natural scale, swara posi

Ask how many shrutis there are and you will be told twenty-two. It is in the textbooks, it is on every website, and it has been repeated for centuries. Nitin Amin's answer is that the number is inadequate. It was a reasonable approximation in its time and has been overtaken. The more interesting question is what your own ear can actually do. What the Word Actually Means "Shrutyante iti Shruti — that which you can decipher is the shruti." So a shruti is not a fixed slot on a s