Personal Information
Ashwin K. Iyer will be entering his third year of Electrical/Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto in the fall of 1999. He is currently working as an ASIC design engineer at Nortel Networks, Microelectronics Group, as part of a co-op placement in Ottawa. Rohin K. Iyer will be entering grade twelve at W.L.Mackenzie Collegiate Institute, and he is currently volunteering at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto.

 

 

Ashwin and his brother Rohin are also students of Carnatic music in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. They have been learning for 9 years under local teachers, and they have travelled to India to study under musicologists and senior musicians Shri S. R. Janakiraman, Shri T. K. Govinda Rao, and Shri T. R. Subramaniam. They are currently studying under Vasumathy Nagarajan in Toronto, a principal disciple of Sangita Kalanidhi Shri S. Ramanathan.
 

Essays in Carnatic Music
Here is an essay in Carnatic Music that we wrote for Kala Magazine, which, over the last year of its establishment, has developed into a high-calibre, high-quality publication distributed widely throughout Toronto and beyond. Subsciption infromation can be obtained via email at the following address: jal@sympatico.ca.
 

Time has evolved Carnatic music into a territory of myriad frontiers, explored devoutly by great founders like Tyagaraja and Dikshitar, and developed stylistically in the calibre of Madurai Mani Iyer, M.D.Ramanathan, and K.V. Narayanaswamy. However, it is surprising that Carnatic music has withstood the impact of change that often comes with age. Despite the generations of tutelage, global crises, and changing times, we find that the same factors that influenced almost all other forms of art leave Carnatic music untouched. Respected Carnatic musicians still adhere to the same basic rules of composition that were established by founding saints and composers. We continue to admire the unmistakable sounds of traditional ragams, still rendered in words once uttered by famous composers. We continue to marvel in the ancient rhythm of a mrdangam, played according to rules of style and composition pioneered centuries before.

Why, then, does this differ from the music we find today? Music that has changed before our eyes, twice or thrice during our own lifetimes? Music that has been adapted, inspired, segregated, and turned up-side down by most major political and social events in recent history? Perhaps Carnatic music is too solidly founded to be changed by mere decades. Perhaps the integrity with which it was created remains in its every facet today.

We are reminded of one of our lessons with Shri T.K. Govinda Rao, in which he said (in Tamil) that “...Carnatic music is much like a constitution... you are given a set of strict rules to which you must adhere and boundaries within which you must exist, but within the scope of these rules and the limits of these boundaries, you are free to glorify the notes and ragas as you wish”. During another class, he taught that “…Carnatic music, too, is not excepted from the laws of nature… what goes up must come down… in order to run, we must first get up and then gain speed; before we come to a stop, we must slow down… the same form must be adhered to when rendering alapanai or kalpanaswaram”.
Carnatic music has secured its undeniable presence among us as a pure art form; that is, it has demonstrated an uncanny ability to survive the threat of complete alteration entirely on the basis of its historical integrity. Thus, the international musical community is chanced, for the ancient principles of Carnatic music have allowed it to escape the impact of time while surmounting the realms of music and science.

Streaming Technology
The Internet has exploded into the Carnatic Music scene as more than just an information medium. The advent of on-line multimedia technologies has allowed users to experience the sights and sounds of Indian Culture, in addition to the many available readings. The idea of a sensory dimension to information has spawned numerous multimedia Carnatic Music sites on the Internet, each boasting innovative new ways to project an age-old art form into the digital renaissance. This site was first created as one such venture. The founding concept was a relatively new one in Carnatic Music-based web content: to generate digitized Carnatic Music recordings and make them available for the listening pleasure of the millions who browse the Internet each day. The technology is known as "streaming", and serves to broadcast, in digital format, musical recordings live on the Internet. The technology works in the following manner: a typically large music file is compressed or "encoded" such that, for example,  one second of music occupies one kilobyte of computer information. Therefore, an internet connection of one kilobyte per second will be able to download one second (occupying one kilobyte) of music every second, and thus play the file in real time.

Currently, there are two forms of compression that are available commercially. The first, and perhaps oldest,  is RealAudio by Progressive Networks. Information is available at their web site, at www.real.com. The second technology is MPEG Layer-3 (or MP3), which uses fractal compression methods. The most popular decoding program for MP3 is WinAMP 1.666, for which information is available at www.winamp.com. MP3, which takes after the standard MPEG video codec, affords substantially superior quality over RealAudio, but it tends to take up slightly more disk space.  

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