Chapter 6 — Musical Instruments

Strike a steel plate with a spoon and then touch it lightly. You will feel it trembling. That trembling is vibration, a rapid back-and-forth movement, and it is the source of every sound we hear, from a temple bell to a whispered word.

When an object vibrates, it pushes the air molecules next to it. Those molecules push their neighbours, which push the next ones, and so on. This chain of pushes travels outward as a sound wave. The molecules themselves do not fly across the room; they only jostle back and forth, passing the disturbance along, much like a rumour passing through a crowd. When the wave reaches our ear, it makes the eardrum vibrate in the same way, and the brain reads this as sound.

Sound needs a medium to travel: a solid, liquid or gas. It travels through air, through water (which is why whales can call to each other over long distances) and even faster through solids (put your ear to a desk while a friend taps the far end). In a vacuum, where there are no molecules, sound cannot travel at all.

Every musical instrument is simply a clever way of making something vibrate:

• In a sitar or veena, a plucked string vibrates.
• In a bansuri or shehnai, a column of air inside a tube vibrates.
• In a tabla or dholak, a stretched skin (membrane) vibrates.
• In manjira or a ghatam, the solid body itself vibrates.

When the vibration stops, the sound stops. That is why a sitar player can silence a string by touching it, and why a drummer sometimes presses the drum head with the palm to cut a sound short.

Try it safely. Stretch a rubber band between two fingers and pluck it. Watch the blur as it vibrates and listen. Then pluck it while holding a paper cup near it. Notice how the sound changes. Never put objects close to anyone's ear while experimenting, and keep sounds at a comfortable level; very loud sound can damage hearing permanently.

The frequency of a vibration is the number of complete back-and-forth movements it makes in one second. It is measured in hertz (Hz); 200 Hz means 200 vibrations every second. Frequency decides pitch, how high or low a sound seems to us.

• A faster vibration has a higher frequency and sounds higher in pitch.
• A slower vibration has a lower frequency and sounds lower in pitch.

Animals show this clearly. An elephant's rumble is very low; some of it is so low that humans cannot hear it at all. A bat's call is so high that it is beyond our hearing. Humans generally hear sounds between about 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz.

How do musicians change frequency? For a string, three things matter:

When a sitar player turns a tuning peg to tighten a string, its tension and frequency rise and the note goes up. When the player presses the string against a fret, the vibrating length becomes shorter and the pitch rises again. The thick bass strings of a surbahar give much lower notes than the thin strings of a sitar.

Wind instruments follow a similar rule. A shorter air column gives a higher note. On a bansuri, closing all the holes makes the longest air column and the lowest note; opening holes one by one shortens the column and the notes climb. That is also why a long bass flute sounds deeper than a small one.

For drums, a tighter skin gives a higher pitch. Tabla players tap the rim with a small hammer to tighten or loosen the straps until the dayan matches the singer's Sa.

Listening practice. Pluck a guitar or ektara string, then tighten the peg slightly and pluck again. Describe the change in words. Always tighten a string slowly and a little at a time; over-tightening can snap it and the broken end can hurt your eyes or hands.

Play Sa on a harmonium, sing Sa, and play Sa on a violin. The pitch is the same, yet you can tell the three apart instantly, even with your eyes closed. The quality that makes this possible is timbre, often described as the tone or colour of a sound.

Timbre depends on three things:

• The material: wood, bamboo, metal, clay, skin or gut each vibrate in their own way. A clay ghatam sounds earthy; a brass bell sounds bright.
• The construction: the size and shape of the body, the number of strings, the kind of reed and so on. A sitar has sympathetic strings (taraf) that ring softly along with the played string, adding a shimmering quality.
• The playing technique: plucking, bowing, striking, blowing, or striking with fingers versus a stick. The same string sounds different when bowed on a sarangi and when plucked on a sarod.

Resonance is the way sound is made louder and richer when a hollow body or cavity vibrates along with the original vibration. A string stretched between two nails is barely audible. Attach it to a hollow box and it suddenly sounds full. The air and wood inside the box pick up the vibration and amplify it. Indian instruments use resonators everywhere:

A ghatam player sometimes presses the mouth of the pot against the stomach and releases it to change the bass sound. This changes the air cavity and so changes the resonance.

Listening activity. Make a list of five instruments you can hear at home or in a recording. For each, write the material it is made of, what vibrates, and two words describing its timbre, such as bright, mellow, nasal, deep or buzzing. Compare your words with a friend's; you will find that describing sound is a skill that improves with practice. Music is both an art and a science: the maker uses physics, and the player turns it into feeling.

India has hundreds of instruments, so musicians have long sorted them into families based on what vibrates. The classical system, described in the ancient text Natyashastra attributed to Bharata, has four groups. It is still the clearest way to understand any instrument, Indian or foreign.

Within each family there are smaller divisions. String instruments may be plucked (sitar, veena), bowed (sarangi, violin) or struck (santoor, played with light wooden hammers). Wind instruments may have no reed (bansuri, where you blow across a hole) or a reed (shehnai and nadaswaram use a double reed; the harmonium uses metal reeds). The morsing, a jaw harp, belongs to the solid family because a thin metal tongue vibrates when plucked against the mouth.

Some instruments are puzzles. The harmonium is played with a keyboard, but the sound comes from air blowing through reeds, so it is a wind instrument. The jal tarang is a set of bowls filled with different amounts of water and struck with sticks; the bowls themselves vibrate, so it is ghana. The anandalahari of the Baul singers has a string fixed to a small drum head; pulling and plucking the string sets the skin vibrating, so it sits between string and membrane.

How to classify an unknown instrument. Ask yourself: When it sounds, what exactly is vibrating? If you can see a string, start with tata. If the player blows, think sushira. If there is a stretched skin, avanaddha. If nothing is stretched and the player strikes or shakes a hard object, ghana. This single question works for instruments from anywhere in the world, from the Western saxophone (sushira) to the African djembe (avanaddha).

Behind every concert is a craftsperson whose name the audience rarely hears. Instrument makers are essential to the survival of traditional music; without them there would be no sitars in Miraj, no veenas in Thanjavur and no tablas in Kolkata or Varanasi. They use scientific principles every day, often learned through generations rather than from books.

How a drum is made. The steps vary by region, but a typical barrel or cylindrical drum is made like this:

• Shaping the body: the maker chooses a seasoned log of hard wood, such as jackfruit or sheesham, and carves and hollows it into a cylinder. Seasoned wood is used because fresh wood cracks as it dries. The thickness of the wall affects the resonance.
• Making the head: goat or buffalo skin, or a modern synthetic sheet, is cleaned, soaked and cut into a circle, often with an outer ring for strength.
• Fixing the head: the head is stretched over the open end and attached to the body.
• Tying the straps: leather or rope straps run along the body from one head to the other. Pulling them tighter, or moving wooden blocks or rings under them, raises the pitch. This is how the drum is tuned.

Makers judge their work by ear: they tap the head, listen, adjust and tap again until the sound is clear and the pitch steady.

Caring for instruments. A well-kept instrument lasts for decades. Some basic rules:

• Keep instruments in a cover or case, away from direct sunlight, damp walls and heaters. Wood and skin swell in humidity and crack in heat.
• Do not place a tabla or mridangam directly on a hard floor; rest it on its cloth ring.
• Never press or scratch the black spot (syahi) on a tabla; it is made of layers of paste and can crack.
• Wipe strings with a dry cloth after playing; sweat rusts them.
• Close the bellows and cover the keys of a harmonium after use.
• Handle borrowed or school instruments with clean hands and return them as you found them.

Meeting a maker. If there is an instrument maker or repairer in your town, ask your teacher whether the class can invite them. Prepare questions: Which materials do you use and why? How did you learn? How do you know when the sound is right? What problems does your craft face today?

Many great musicians become so closely linked with their instrument that the two names are spoken together. One such artist is Annapurna Devi (1927-2018), one of the most respected figures in Hindustani classical music.

She was born Roshanara Khan at Maihar in present-day Madhya Pradesh, the daughter of the legendary Baba Allauddin Khan of the Maihar gharana, the same teacher who founded the Maihar Band. Her father first taught her the sitar and later trained her on the surbahar. He came to regard her as his finest student, a remarkable statement from a teacher whose pupils included some of the greatest names in Indian music.

About the surbahar. The surbahar is a plucked string instrument often called the bass sitar. It is larger than a sitar, with thicker strings, a wider neck and a large resonating gourd, so its notes are deeper and they ring for longer. These qualities make it ideal for the alaap, the slow, unhurried opening of a raga performance in which the artist explores each note before any rhythm begins. The heavy strings and long reach make it physically demanding, which is one reason few women played it at that time. Annapurna Devi mastered it fully.

A teacher above all. Annapurna Devi performed publicly in her early years but later chose not to perform in public at all. Instead she devoted herself to practice and to teaching, with very high standards and deep commitment to tradition and to the correct shape of each raga. Her students include the flute maestro Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia and the sitarist Pandit Nikhil Banerjee, both of whom became among the most celebrated musicians of their generation. Through them, her music reached audiences around the world.

What we can learn. Her life shows that greatness in music is not measured only by fame or stage appearances. Discipline, depth of practice and generosity in teaching can shape the future of an art form. It also reminds us that an instrument considered unusual for someone, because of gender or physical demands, can be mastered through determination.

Listening task. Find a recording of a surbahar alaap and a sitar alaap. Listen to one minute of each and note differences in depth, length of each note and mood.

Today the bansuri is heard on concert stages around the world, but for centuries it was mostly a folk instrument, the flute of cowherds and the flute of Krishna in stories and paintings. The person most credited with bringing it into the Hindustani classical concert is Pannalal Ghosh (1911-1960).

Early years. As a boy in Bengal he picked up a small flute of the kind cowherds played. He was already learning the sitar from his father, and he tried to play on the flute the musical patterns he was learning on the sitar. At about eighteen he began to concentrate seriously on the flute. Later he became a disciple of Baba Allauddin Khan, which gave him a deep grounding in ragas.

Re-designing the instrument. Ghosh realised that the small folk flute did not have the depth and fullness needed for slow classical music. He experimented with metal and various woods, and finally chose bamboo. He settled on a flute about 32 inches long, whose larger size gave a lower pitch and a richer, more resonant tone (remember from the science topics: a longer air column gives a lower note). He is also credited with introducing an extra, seventh finger hole, which made certain notes easier to play precisely. These changes showed how a musician can use the science of sound to improve an instrument.

A wide career. In Calcutta he worked in music production at New Theatres. In 1940 he moved to Bombay, and the film Sneh Bandhan (1940) was his first as an independent music composer. In 1952 he jointly composed the background music for the film Aandhiyan along with Ustad Ali Akbar Khan and Pandit Ravi Shankar. He thus moved easily between classical concerts and film music.

His legacy. Every major bansuri player who followed, including Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia, performs on the kind of long concert flute that Pannalal Ghosh established. The instrument that was once seen as a simple village flute is now a respected classical instrument because one musician questioned its limits and redesigned it.

Think about it. If you play an instrument, what is one thing about it you wish worked better? How might you change it, and what scientific idea would your change use?

The Saraswati veena is one of the oldest and most revered instruments of Carnatic music. It is a plucked string instrument with a large wooden resonator (kudam), a long fretted neck and often a second gourd near the top. Its sound is deep and singing, and it can glide between notes, which suits the ornaments (gamakas) of Carnatic music. One of its greatest twentieth-century masters was Mysore V. Doraiswamy Iyengar.

A musical family. Doraiswamy Iyengar was born in 1920 into a family of well-known Carnatic musicians. His father, Venkatesh Iyengar, was a court musician in the royal court of Mysore and was skilled on both the flute and the veena. Doraiswamy began learning the veena from his father at the age of six. Later he became a disciple of the celebrated Veena Venkatagiriyappa. He spent his early years in the village of Gaddavalli in Hassan district, Karnataka.

The Mysore bani. A bani is a recognisable style of playing passed from teacher to student. Doraiswamy Iyengar developed a distinctive way of playing, clear, melodious and graceful, and his style came to be known as the Mysore bani of veena playing.

Honours and service. He was chosen as an Asthana Vidwan, a royal musician of the Mysore court, at a young age, and he also taught music to members of the royal family. Later he served as Music Director at All India Radio, Bangalore, bringing classical music to listeners across the region. His honours include an honorary doctorate from the University of Mysore (1975), the Padma Bhushan (1983), and the Sangeetha Kalanidhi of the Madras Music Academy (1984), one of the highest awards in Carnatic music, along with several other titles.

What his story shows. Learning from childhood, studying with more than one master, and then shaping a personal style is a common path for Indian classical musicians. A bani is not invented overnight; it grows from years of practice on top of a strong tradition. His work at All India Radio also shows how public institutions help keep classical music alive.

Listening task. Listen to a short veena recording and notice how the player slides between notes by pulling the string sideways on the fret. Compare it with the sitar, which also uses this technique, called meend.

Indian music history is full of artists whose names are inseparable from their instruments. Knowing a few of them helps you listen with more interest and recognise instruments by their sound.

Zakir Hussain, Vikku Vinayakram and the singer Shankar Mahadevan have performed together, showing how Hindustani and Carnatic artists combine instruments from different traditions on one stage.

Recognising instruments from clues. Puzzles such as word searches and crosswords are a fun way to fix instrument names in memory. A good crossword clue gives the family, a physical feature and sometimes a famous player. Here are clues of that kind and how to reason them out:

• A string instrument of hard wood like walnut, with more than a hundred strings: the santoor.
• A barrel drum used to accompany dhrupad singing: the pakhawaj.
• A clay pot played as a drum in Carnatic concerts: the ghatam.
• A long-necked instrument of four strings plucked with the fingers to give a drone: the tanpura.
• A wind instrument with a keyboard, sounding through reeds: the harmonium.
• Bowls of water struck with sticks: the jal tarang.
• A bowed folk instrument of Rajasthan and Sindh: the sarangi or the kamaicha.

Notice how each clue uses the science you learned: the family (what vibrates), the material, and the playing technique. You can write your own clues the same way.

How to listen and recognise. Close your eyes during a recording and ask: Is the sound plucked, bowed, blown or struck? Does it slide between notes or jump? Is it bright or mellow? Is there a drone behind it? With practice you will tell a sitar from a sarod (the sarod has no frets and a metal fingerboard, giving a rounder, sliding tone) and a shehnai from a nadaswaram (the nadaswaram is longer and louder, used in South Indian temples and weddings).

Almost every region of India has its own drums and rhythm instruments, shaped by local materials, festivals and dances. Mapping them is a good way to see India's musical diversity.

Notice the patterns. Clay drums such as the khol and tumbaknaari appear where good clay and pottery traditions exist. Drums played with sticks, such as the chenda and halge, tend to be loud enough for outdoor festivals. Drums like the pung and madal are played while dancing, so they are light enough to carry on the body.

Mapping activity. Print an outline map of India. Mark each instrument in its state with a small symbol and a label. Use a different colour for each type, for example clay drums in brown, stick drums in red and hand drums in blue. Add a key. Then add one or two instruments from your own region that are not in the list. Ask elders at home what drums are played at weddings or festivals in your community.

Judging your map. Check that each label is in the right state, that the key matches the colours, and that the map is neat enough for a classmate to read without your help. A good map tells a story at a glance: here, you should be able to see that rhythm is everywhere in India, but its voice changes from place to place.