Patantara

Link Sharing

Tue, 01 Mar 2022 15:16:05 +0530

Sometimes you want to let a few people view a document without having them register with Patantara and having to explicitly give them permission through their email addresses. Link sharing is a way to do that without making your document public.

Bouncy Hints

Wed, 29 May 2019 10:50:56 +0530

Sometimes when practicing, you just need that extra bit of a hint about the timing of the various svaras/lyrics that make up a line … before you take off on your own. With the new “hints” facility, Patantara will now highlight lyrics or svaras during playback, practice or recording using a bouncing ball.

Warning: This is work in progress and is subject to change.

Practice Sets

Wed, 12 Dec 2018 01:03:18 +0530

We all have our own pace, rhythm and techniques of practice. When working with a teacher, repetition and alternation are two important ways to reinforce our learnings. The new “practice sets” facility of the Patantara player helps you set up such a repetition and alternation pattern of your choosing when you’re working on a composition.

Tala Player

Sat, 22 Sep 2018 10:00:52 +0530

A built-in tala player is now available for documents with audio tracks.

A logo for Patantara

Sun, 28 Jan 2018 18:38:08 +0530

I’ve been exploring some ways to provide online teaching/learning aids for Carnatic music via the Patantara site. It is about time I captured some of the principles that we would like to stand by in a recognizable logo. While the finesse of the logo hasn’t been executed yet, here is a shape that has stuck with me for some time now.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

Collections

Thu, 11 Jan 2018 07:51:09 +0530

Patantara supports a notion of “collections” to help teachers maintain access permissions for a set of documents they give access to their students. This post describes how to use them.

Easing notation creation using substitutions

Tue, 02 Jan 2018 02:42:48 +0530

For most compositions, the “svarasthana” notation which uses the letter SrRgGmMPdDnN for the 12 svara sthanas serves pretty well. For ragas which treat R as “ga”, for example, this doesn’t work as it creates a difference between how the svara is written and how it is sung. This also creates difficulties with typing out svaras where you know the raga isn’t going to change.

The “substitutions” feature in the Patantara editor helps with these situations and this post is about how to use it.

Authoring documents with audio tracks

Sat, 30 Dec 2017 23:09:55 +0530

In the previous post, we saw how to use a document that has audio tracks assigned to notation lines. In this post, we’re going to see how to go about creating such a document. Sticking with tradition, we’ll use examples from Gaṇarājēna Rakṣitōham for illustration.

Documents with audio tracks

Sat, 30 Dec 2017 19:56:22 +0530

The ability to have audio tracks integrated with music notation would be of great use to students of Carnatic music. Towards that, we’ve now added support for anyone adding documents to Patantara to also attach audio recordings to the notation lines. We’ve also added a couple of commonly used and requested tools to aid learning and practice that’s integrated right into the notation documents published on Patantara.

In this post we first show you how to use a document which has audio tracks associated with notation lines. In the next post, we will describe for authors how to create such documents.

Controlling who can view/edit your document

Sun, 16 Apr 2017 10:21:13 +0530

Earlier, we wrote about the preamble, using which you can change the file name of a document by which it is catalogued. We’d mentioned that the document preamble is intended for more controls on the document being available in a versioned manner. In this post, we introduce how you can control who can view/edit your document.

Changing a document's name

Wed, 29 Mar 2017 15:04:42 +0530

So far, the names of patantara documents were fixed at creation time. This has proved to be disadvantageous especially given that when a new document is needed, many users are using the “copy” function to copy an existing starter document, which ends up having the same name as the original.

As of this post, patantara supports changing the catalog name of a document for the convenience of users.

Why you should not use Microsoft Word for music notation

Sun, 25 Dec 2016 12:36:19 +0530

Many music notation publication sites provide notation in the form of Microsoft Word “doc” or “docx” files. There are many reasons to avoid using MSWord for notation of Indian classical music. I will try to list down a few here and while on the topic argue why the approach taken by Patantara is much more enduring.

New email-based signin process

Sun, 25 Dec 2016 11:23:24 +0530

Patantara had thus far used Mozilla Persona for signing in users for editing documents. Since Mozilla retired the Persona service this month, a new email-based signin mechanism is now in place. Our hope is that this will be easier to use for our less technically inclined users.

Sthayi (octave) markers

Sun, 25 Dec 2016 10:44:01 +0530

The Patantara notation viewer used to use combining unicode characters to display sthayi - i.e. octave - markers. These appear as either single dot above or below a svara letter or a double dot above or below. The single dot indicates one octave shift and the double dot indicates two octave shift. These markers displayed correctly only in Safari on MacOSX and failed on the more commonly used Chrome browser due to a series of bugs in Chrome. We’ve now “fixed” these by rendering the dots separately and not relying on the browser’s ability to handle unicode combining characters correctly.

Mixed transliteration

Sun, 25 Oct 2015 12:24:39 +0530

Patantara has supported automatic transliteration to multiple Indic scripts from a single roman starting point. This is not always ideal as there is often a need to bring in lyric text in the native script, perhaps when copy-pasting from another source. Now, Patantara can help you with this situation by automatically detecting the script and morphing it into the target script.

For an example, see Medha Suktam

In that example, text to be transliterated is presented directly in devanagari instead of first expressing it in roman diacritics.

Diacritics editor bug fixed

Sat, 11 Apr 2015 16:37:28 +0530

It looks like Patantara’s text editor has not recently been usable for typing roman letters with diacritic marks. If you type “a” and marked with a combining accent character, the editor would pretend that it needed two spaces to represent that and would jump two spaces around the accented “a”.

I did a long due upgrade to CodeMirror - from v3.20 to v5.1 - which solved this issue on the site. Now roman letters with combining diacritics take up the correct number of spaces.

Amba Kamakshi

Fri, 24 Oct 2014 07:07:14 +0530

Added notation for Syama Sastri’s svarajati “Amba Kamaksi”. Not all sections are complete, but the notation part is.

What's happening?

Thu, 04 Sep 2014 04:50:58 +0530

The site has received some minor tweaks regarding presentation of text. For example, you can now mark regions of text to be transliterated using conventional Markdown link notation with the link #lyrics and these regions will change when you change the lyrics text script at the top of a notation page.

More importantly, we’re working to bring online Dr. Sripada Pinakapani’s meticulous compilation of 160 and then some pallavis previously published in book form as “Pallavi Gāna Sudhā”. About 30% of the work has been n completed thus far, and the notation presentation algorithms will also undergo some changes necessary to maintain authenticity to the original material.

Creating/editing notations on patantara is now open to all

Mon, 28 Jul 2014 18:52:39 +0530

Until today, creating/editing/publishing notations was limited to a few invited people. From today on, anyone who wants to create notation that can be viewed automatically in five south Indian language scripts, or as staff notation is welcome to use Patantara to do it. You don’t even have to create an account on patantara.com. Just sign in using Mozilla Persona using one of your existing accounts such as Gmail or Yahoo! mail.

Sarasuda - Saveri varnam notation

Tue, 22 Jul 2014 09:21:33 +0530

Added notation of Saveri varnam to patantara. Mrs. Sudha Harikrishnan kindly provided the descriptive notation for this beautiful varnam.

A note on “prescriptive” and “descriptive” notation -

No more intimidating URLs

Sun, 06 Apr 2014 13:40:41 +0530

Just landed a few changes on Patantara -

The names (URLs) of documents and attachments are now much shorter and much less intimidating.
Some UI tweaks in the editor to help with the process of adding attachments. When you now drag-drop a file, the label of the reference created will be automatically selected so that you can change it immediately to something that is more meaningful in the context of the document.

Audio track attachments

Sat, 05 Apr 2014 00:18:41 +0530

What’s a music site without actual sound on it, right? Now, folks with editing rights on Patantara can add audio attachments to the documents they create. I describe how to do that in this post using the canonical Ganarajena Raksitoham example.

Why show Carnatic music in staff notation?

Sun, 16 Mar 2014 09:18:52 +0530

Recently, I added support for viewing Carnatic notation on Patantara as western staff notation, albeit with some known deficiencies that I’m working to address. In this post, I talk about the reasons behind the support for staff notation and their influence on the format and extent of support for the notation on the site.

Staff notation support

Thu, 13 Mar 2014 13:33:14 +0530

One of the benefits of having a machine parseable representation is that it can be automatically re-presented in many forms. We’ve so far seen such re-presentation of lyrics and svara text in the South Indian languages. I now present an initial take on showing the documents using western staff notation.

When you pick any document in the patantara catalog, it will first be shown as “carnatic notation”. Select “Show as staff notation” to view it as staff notation.

Write notation once and publish in 5 languages (contd.)

Fri, 07 Mar 2014 11:08:00 +0530

I’m excited to announce a first take at enabling lyrics to be viewed in any of the South Indian languages (+ devanagari)!

Write notation once and publish in 5 languages

Fri, 28 Feb 2014 18:56:56 +0530

All notations added to Patantara so far (and any that you add from now on, of course) will be viewable in four South Indian language scripts - Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu - in addition to Roman svara letters. This is part of the larger plan of Patantara to defer the presentation choice of musical material to the point at which it is consumed rather than when it is first produced.

While currently the language scripts apply only to prescriptive svaras, the same concept will soon be extended to support lyrics as well, moving towards a true multi-lingual publication platform.

Screenshots of different views of the first line of “Ganarajena Rakshitoham” follow.

Svara script choice

Thu, 27 Feb 2014 00:39:51 +0530

Patantara now has experimental support for Tamil and Roman svara script display when viewing any notation document. The documents are still created using the roman svarasthana notation, but the displayed script can be changed to suit the viewer’s preferred language.

How to type notation using the Patantara editor

Sat, 15 Feb 2014 11:10:14 +0530

In this post, I present a fairly complex example of typing in notation using the Patantara Carnatic notation editor. I start from notation printed on paper and walk the reader through the thinking process required to be able to translate it for presentation on the web using Carnot.

The notation editor on Patantara is actually in Markdown format, which provides a way to format text in various ways, but I will here focus on only the notation part of it. To learn how to use Markdown along with Carnot, you will be able to read through any of the existing notation pages once you know how to use Carnot, so in this post I focus on Carnot.

Introducing "published" documents

Sun, 12 Jan 2014 15:30:04 +0530

Patantara has provided the ability to create and edit Carnatic music notations and have them instantly published on the web, with facility for multiple editors to collaborate on a document. However, a document can be in a “work in progress” state during which the authors/editors do not wish for it to be visible, yet, to the world. This is true, in particular, of newly created documents. A new “publish” feature has been introduced to address this issue, so that the publicly visible documents are all available in a stable and high quality state all the time.