Raag FAQ

What is a raag?

A raag in Indian music is similar to a scale in Western music.

I think of raags as lying between two extremes:

1. A bag of notes that go well together.

2. A well-known melody.

The first one is known as a thaat in Indian music, and a mode in Western music.

I'm simplifying a bit, as I am in the rest of the explanation.

The second one you understand - it like some well-known strand of music, a common motif / refrain / riff that people then start creating variations of.

Both raags and scales lie somewhere between these two extremes, but raags veer more towards the second extreme. At the same time, they're not just fixed riffs. Instead, they are more like, say, Markov chains that describe how a piece of music in that raag will grow, possibly indefinitely.

Each rendition of a raag, at the hands or the voice of a capable musician, is a unique instantiation of this pattern.

They're still formal, except this formal structure is not written down, it is passed in an oral tradition from teachers to students.

People try to categorize them, give them names etc so that they're easier to talk about. This is very useful, but it is akin to the relationship of grammar with language - language does not arise from the grammar written down in textbooks, it is the other way around, grammars try to capture the gist of living languages.

What is a thaat?

The raags that I'm illustrating are actually thaats. That is, there is a Bhairav thaat (a thaat being a set of 7 out of the 12 notes). From this same set of 7 notes can be formed many raags, one of which incidentally in this case is the Bhairav raag.

The ladder representation of the intervals between the notes is visualizing the Bhairav thaat, not the Bhairav raag. The raga has more structure and rules as compared to the thaat, but I haven't yet found a good way to visualize the raag itself.

As another example, the illustration of raag Yaman is actually illustrating the Kalyan thaat.

Since these illustrations are aimed to encourage people to make music, not to be an authoritative source, I have traded inaccuracy (by not mentioning the thaats) for a more beginner friendly presentation.

How do I convert a raag to Western notes?

This is perhaps the only useful question on this page. Most instruments that amateurs have access to today are based on Western notes, so being able to convert raags to Western notes enables more people to play them.

This is not an exact mapping. Raags are usually rendered on fretless instruments (the voice being one), and quarter notes feature often in the rendition. The mapping given here does not capture these microtones.

The Indian music tradition employs a movable set of notes. These notes are uttered aloud as:

But they don't map to a fixed frequency. Nor is there any correspondence to a western note like C or A.

Instead, what these notes describe is distances, or intervals. We can then pick any frequency, or any western note, as our starting note (the Sa), and then the rest of the sequence can be one-to-one mapped to the corresponding western notes starting from that point.

Above we listed the 7 major notes. There are also 5 minor ones, for a total of 12. All 12 in sequence are sometimes notated as:

So suppose we want to start with the note A on the guitar (say, A2, the open second string). We will move our sequence of 12 notes so that our starting (root) note, S, corresponds to A. Then, it is a one-to-one mapping:

That's it.

You didn't convert the raag?!

That was left as an exercise for the reader :)

But let's do one example. Let's take the Bhairav thaat. If you look around on the internet, you'll find that it consists of the following notes:

Let's put these within the sequence of all 12 notes, focusing on the ones that form the thaat.

Then let's include the mapping table from above. I've also included the distance from the root note.

Finally, we can read off corresponding western notes.

Since our mapping table used A as the root note, so these are the western notes corresponding to Bhairav thaat played with A as the root note. We can repeat the same exercise to get the raag from any other starting note too.

Have I heard the Bhairav raag already?

You likely have. Raag Bhairav (or more accurately, the Bhairav thaat) is also known as the Double Harmonic major scale, Byzantine scale, Hijaz Kar, or Gypsy major. A famous example of a song that uses this scale is Misirlou, the theme song for the movie Pulp Fiction.