Spectrum of notes used in Carnatic Music 

Subramaniam Chandrasekar

That is right, but then, R2 and G1, R3 and G2, D2 and N1, and D3 and N2 are treated on the same footing. Therefore, she does turn out to be correct! Let's back track this from the well known melakartha scheme: it has 72 ragas (parent), because we have 1 S and 1 P to choose from, 2 Mas, and 6 of (R+G) and 6 (D+N), and hence 2x6x6=72 of them. (You impose another constraint in getting at this number: R3 comes only with G3, since G1 is lower in frequency, otherwise you would have had 2x7x7 ragas). Hope it helped! :-)

:) You are right and wrong. After equal interval (12 notes) western instruments like Harmonium came to India, things changed. Before that we had up to 21 intervals in Carnatic. (lots of arguments on this also)I lived next door to a great Veena Vidvan. He set the frets to play in the old style tuning and used to explain how the Carnatic notes were different from western tuning. He used to set the frets until he gets the correct beat note in a 17 notes scale. Now we are playing Carnatic music in western intervals. If in every book published on the Carnatic, notes are changed to 12 interval version, this would not be the case. As you said it would the same footing but share a common name. We say 17 notes on book, but play 12 notes. The old style is felt only when we transit from one note to another slowly. In those days of western music, many chords sounded horrible until they adopted to 12 intervals. Many songs cannot be played in other keys because of that. And they always mentioned what key the song must be played even though it is purely instrumental. Regards.

Ah ok. :-)

That’s not a song, that’s a sruti used for keeping the pitch.