Music is an aural art. Any tone, which has a fixed frequency, can be used as a musical note. However, we sing and play music using more than one note. The difference between frequencies of any two notes is known as interval.
Long ago, a question popped in ancient artists’ mind.
What is the biggest or smallest note interval?
A never ending quest started. The Sharutis were their first yardsticks to map the intervals between notes, nothing more and nothing less.
We do not know the origin of music, but we do know that the theory of music is not the mother of music. The grammar of a language is defined after a language has been established. Also, a child learns to speak the language and then learns to read and write.
In the development of music, the things went like this (from a Natyashaster verse):
First songs, then notes, then Grams, Sharutis and then the Jaties (raags)
When we say that the songs must have developed after humans were civilized, we are forgetting something. Look around you. Birds sing, so do the other mammals. There are songs everywhere.
It is certain that as humans got civilized, their songs got complicated. With the development of language, the songs became more meaningful. The primal screams evolved into poems of love, separation, nature, beauty and other things that affected us emotionally. When something said through conversation does not capture the essence of our feelings, a song erupts in us. That is a primal instinct. It is not something that is impossible to do without the knowledge of Sharuties and Grams. A villager in India or a Gypsy in Europe cannot stop singing just because they do not know the difference between Just intonation and Chromatic intonation. These are afterthoughts.
When the enlightened artists of the ancient world sang their songs, the beauty of changing pitch compelled them to find more about it. What is it that changing the pitch up and down in certain ways sounds so…musical!
The first known theory of music in Indian Vedas (Samveda) contains four notes. Nowadays notes are always mentioned in ascending (such as C D E or Sa Re Ga) order. In Vedic tradition, the notes are mentioned in Avrohatmic order (in descending). The first four the Vedic artists knew were:
Madhyam (ma), Gandhar (ga), Rishav and Shadaj.
These were known as the first, second, third and fourth Svaras.
When I say they ‘knew’ about four notes, that doesn’t mean that they were unaware of higher and lower pitches. As described above, this was purely theoretical classification that explained the notes used in popular hymns and songs.
Then another note was found below all other known notes. They called it Mandar. A musicologist Tambru named it Dhaivat (the note that only enlightened one can hear, as it is the first note that has perfect third relation to the first note). This was the fifth note. Then Tambru established another note (Nishad) between Dhaivat and Shadaj. It was called the sixth. Later, below all other notes another note was found. It was named the ‘seventh.’ As it completed the septave, this note was also established above the first (Madhaym).
So in Samveda, M, G, R, S, D, N, P became the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh. These notes were not the same as our modern notes with same names.
Here I would like to give you a simple example of Bharat Muni’s Shudh (pure) Suptak on a Swar Mandal or a Harpsichord:
At first look, the time theory of Raags alludes many. It seems random, there are formulas however. It is directly connected to the notes used in a Raag. Every Note, when used with certain other notes, has a different effect. That creates certain moods. Based on that, we can divide Raags into three categories: