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Drone accompaniment for Raga Puriya

PureTones is a musical exploration to create drone accompaniments and mutually consonant musical scales. PureTones uses an envelope of overtones whose pitches are tuned finely as intended to support the desired musical scale. Here the PureTones drone has been tuned for Raga Puriya.

Detailed Notes:
Let us denote the 12 musical notes in an octave as:

Sa re Re ga Ga ma Ma Pa dha Dha ni Ni SA

where notes beginning with a lower case denote Komal or flat notes, while notes beginning with an upper case denote Tivra or sharp notes, and SA denotes the octave of Sa.

In the modern era, the Puriya scale is taken to be Sa re Ga Ma Dha Ni. There are some early versions of Puriya where dha is used instead of Dha, which is arguably more appropriate in terms of Lakshanas. But let us stick to today’s scale.

So, Puriya is a Shadava Pancham Varjit Raga, or in other words, a hexatonic Raga without the fifth. The Amsa (dominant) notes are Ni, Ga and Ma, while re and Dha are Alpatva (used rarely).

Ni has a Samvad (consonance) with Ga and Ma, re has no Samvad (and hence kept as Alpatva), and Ga and Dha are related. But as a Lakshya (aesthetic choice), Dha is also kept as Alpatva. The Nyasa notes (resolving notes for phrases) are on Ni and Ma.

This may already motivate the reason for this Tanpura tuning which is Ni-SA-Sa-Ma-SA-Sa. Being a digital instrument, it is easy enough to synthesize a six string Tanpura. This was a challenging tuning for me as I have not used Ni-Ma tuning earlier myself. Specifically, in this case, Ma is slightly different from the Samvad of Ni (fifth of Ni). This gives a different take to Puriya with the ability to microtonally vary Ni, Ma and Ga.

In a four string instrument, you would tune to Ni SA SA Sa, and that will take care of all the requirements for Puriya.

For more details on the technical terms used above and the grammar of Indian Classical music in general, please refer to https://www.chandraveena.com/blog/grammar-of-music/

To learn more about PureTones, visit https://puretones.sadharani.com

Check out PureTones on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGkhen1YJk-c_O4361csmaQ/

PureTones is a musical exploration to create overtone envelopes with mutually consonant musical scales.

1. puretones.sadharani.com