Announcing preliminary support available for gamaka symbols used in the Sangīta Sampradāya Pradarṣiṇi (SSP).

The SSP introduces various symbols that accompany a classification of types of gamakas. The types are not exhaustive when looked at current practice, but nevertheless have historical value in the musicology of Carnatic music.

Patantara now supports a subset of the symbols in the historic document to assist musicologists in incorporating it into current notations. The symbols are purely typographic and do not have musical semantics in the context of Patantara’s notation format, which has otherwise maintained direct relationship to the music. Here we describe how to use it.

Annotations

The symbols are considered “annotations” to the current svara based lines in the notation. A annotations = line in a “paragraph” specifies which symbols should accompany which svaras using a simple syntax.

tala pattern = || , , , , | , , | , , ||
aksharas per line = 8

S R G M P D N S+
annotations = , , nok , / _ , ,

The above notation fragment gets rendered as -

Timing: Each symbol occupies one “akshara” or whatever fraction fitted to the line. The symbols go over only the “prescriptive” line. If a line also has “descriptive” svaras, the symbols still go over the prescriptive line, since the “descriptive notation” is seen as a general way to capture the movement instead of using mnemonic symbols that often aren’t really all that mnemonic to practitioners.

Filler: The , is a filler that takes up an akshara without actually producing any annotation.

Symbols: Three letter abbreviations can be used to denote the various symbols. The complete set is kam, sph, pra, nok, rav, kha, val, eja, ija, odu, ori. Some of them can also be indicated more concisely using mnemonic characters. The table below summarizes the supported ways to indicate the annotations.

Extensions: A _ “extends” the preceding symbol to another akshara. This is how symbols like “etra jaaru” and “irakka jaaru” can be made to span multiple aksharas. Of the supported symbols, kampita, the ja̅rus and vaḷi can extend over multiple aksharas. A _ may be placed at the start of a line if there is a preceding line that has an annotation that is intended to span across lines.

Multiple stacked symbols on a single akshara are also supported by using + between the symbol names without any intervening spaces, like nok+eja. The symbols are stacked from bottom to top, so nok+eja will result in nok below eja.

Caveat: It is up to the annotator to ensure the semantics of these possible combinations or the meaning of the annotations used.

Errors: If you used a name that’s not supported, such as gamaka, then it will be shown in its spot in red - like gamaka - where the annotation symbol was supposed to occur.