With absolutely no knowledge of ragas past or present, or even the tools to start a foundation, I’ve amused myself for hours on Puzzle Me Raga. It’s mostly just listening to the samples then pressing ‘Hint’ repeatedly until the word appears, but an incredibly addictive and enjoyable way to pass time when you should be working.
So what’s a raga? Well, here’s what I’ve found out.
A raga is considered the most important concept in music making for South Asian musicians. Defined as a tonal framework, there are notes specified going up and going down, with the emphasise placed on them setting the mood and defining the raga. The best explanation I’ve come across is that a raga sits somewhere between a scale and a song – not as wide open as a scale but nowhere near as fixed as a song.
There are six primary ragas of Hindustani Classical music (Bhairav, Malkauns, Deepak, Shri, Megh and Hindol) and then each of them have variations in the form of five ‘wives’ called ragini, and eight ‘sons’ called putras and then ‘daughters-in-laws’, making eighty-four in all.
In actuality however there are thousands of ragas in use, and now, thanks to Puzzle Me Raga, you can test your knowledge of the lot of them. And the fact that there’s audio clips to the clues mean that with no idea what you’re doing you can still get lost in the musical world.
There’s also identifying raga’s from movie themes, artists by pictures, Hindustani tala’s and Indian musical instruments to name a few. Check it out from the link below.
Puzzle Me Raga here: http://amuselabs.com/pmr/puzzles