[INDOLOGY] tuning paste

Sat Aug 5 19:12:33 UTC 2023

Dear Herman (if I may),

About the paste used nowadays to produce varying membrane thickness in 
mrdangam : "Iron filings or manganese dust mixed with cooked rice 
provide the black-paste [sic] on the right head of the Mridangam." (P. 
Sambamoorthy; Laya Vadyas, New Delhi : All India Handicrafts Board, 
1959, p. 3).  I haven't heard it called /mārjanā/ in this context -- of 
course, this doesn't mean it is not attested/./

What is alluded to in Naa.tyazaastra, ch 33 under /mārjan//ā/ could be 
something like the above, but that is not clear. Another possibility is 
something like this : "[i]n the drum Urumi, the milky juice of a plant 
is applied on the right head and rubbed. This head when stroked, gives 
that characteristic sound. In fact, Urumi is an onamatopoetic name." (P. 
Sambamoorthy, op. cit. p. 3).

Coming back to the mridangam, the effect of the paste at the center of 
Indian drums has been elucidated by C. Venkata Raman (Nobel Prize in 
Physics, 1930). He showed that :

"in the Indian musical drums we have a circular drum-head which is 
loaded and damped in such a manner that all the overtones above the 
ninth are suppressed and these nine are grouped in such a manner as to 
give a succession of five tones in harmonic sequence."

see

Scientific papers of C. V. Raman, volume 2, p. 464

(reprinted from "The Indian musical drums" Proc. Indian Acad. Sci. A1 
179-188 (1935)).

available at archive.org. This is why the sound of the mridangam 
markedly differs from that of a drum with a mere circular (uniform) 
membrane, as anybody can check.

The above volume of over six hundred pages contains C. Venkata Raman's 
contributions to acoustics. He was himself a competent violin player, 
and he analyzed, among other things, the workings of a variety of 
musical instruments. The papers relevant to Indian drums are articles 
42, 43, 45 and 46.

Many sections of these papers may be followed with little scientific 
background. For this reason, some of his arguments, that only require 
musical sense and experimenting with strokes, may be historically 
relevant in part, although that wasn't his focus of interest. He does 
not refrain from using modern physical concepts in his papers.

In ancient Tamil literature, there were also much bigger drums as long 
as a bed (this refers of course to how poet மோசிகீரனார் nearly escaped 
death, see புறம் 50). If these war drums looked like /timpani/, the 
relevant tuning may have been different.

The /timpani/ or kettledrums also admit of tuning -- see the beginning 
of the second movement of Beethoven's D minor symphony op.  125 (the 
"choral" s.) for a familiar and remarkable example among many. However, 
modern timpani do not sound at all like the mridangam, apparently 
because only the first three frequencies are controlled in the former, 
as opposed to nine in the latter. "The three principal modes, under 
normal playing and tuning conditions, have frequencies nearly in the 
ratio of 4:3:2, thus giving timpani a musical pitch which is easily 
discernible." (CA Anderson and TD Rossing, /J Acoust Soc Am/ 66, S18 
(1979), Abstract). It appears that the loading here is provided by the 
large air mass enclosed in the drum, rather than by a paste.

At any rate, a variety of physical phenomena, some rather subtle, need 
to be taken into account to understand the effect of drum shape and 
tuning. Even if the physics had not been understood in ancient times, 
the musical implications of surface treatment were observed --  
otherwise these treatments would not have been adopted in the first 
place. And it is apparent they are missed if one disregards the 
correlation between drum construction and the sounds it can produce -- 
they /are/ very difficult to guess indeed.

(Sir) CV Raman is better known for his work in Optics. He discovered 
what we now call the Raman effect. He explained why the blue color of 
the Mediterranean, or of ice in glaciers, are different from the blue 
color of the sky. Recall that it is Lord Rayleigh that had explained why 
the sky is blue even though the sun isn't.

I hope this helps somewhat,

Kind regards,

               Satyanad Kichenassamy

Le 05/08/2023 à 10:59, Tieken, H.J.H. (Herman) via INDOLOGY a écrit :
> Dear List members,
>
> I would like to know more about the so-called tuning paste, or the mud 
> smeared on the membrane of a drum (Skt /mārjanā/) or (in Caṅkam 
> poetry) a lute (/yāḻ/). What does it actually do, for instance, is it 
> making the leather more supple?
>
> With kind regards, Herman
>
> Herman Tieken
> Stationsweg 58
> 2515 BP Den Haag
> The Netherlands
> 00 31 (0)70 2208127
> website: hermantieken.com <http://hermantieken.com/>
>
> /The Aśoka Inscriptions: Analysing a corpus/, New Delhi: Primus Books, 
> 2023.
> https://primusbooks.com/ancient/the-asoka-inscriptions-analysing-a-corpus-by-herman-tieken/ 
> <https://primusbooks.com/ancient/the-asoka-inscriptions-analysing-a-corpus-by-herman-tieken/>
>
> /
> /
>
> _______________________________________________
> INDOLOGY mailing list
> INDOLOGY at list.indology.info
> https://list.indology.info/mailman/listinfo/indology

-- 
**********************************************
Satyanad KICHENASSAMY
Professor of Mathematics
Laboratoire de Mathématiques de Reims  (CNRS, UMR9008)
Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne
F-51687 Reims Cedex 2
France
Web:https://www.normalesup.org/~kichenassamy
**********************************************
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://list.indology.info/pipermail/indology/attachments/20230805/99a08c9b/attachment.htm>