Sudarshan Iyengar's Sangita App Might Change the Way Musicians Write Songs

Far too often, we forget that creativity is fluid. The medium in which an artist creates can not, and should not, be limited. A song? A poem? A painting? What about an app?

Sudarshan Iyengar finds himself in the center of a unique Venn diagram. By day, he’s a 9-to-5 web designer, and a good one at that. By night, he raps as one half of post bag, an East Coast hip-hop duo, and occasionally transforms into his masked alter ego, Muunji, fusing sounds of American R&B and Indian classical music.

His passions and his relentless pursuit of them know no bounds.

“I would need 48 hours every day to do justice to my curiosity,” Iyengar says. “One of my major personal goals in the past few years has been to find connections between my interests in design, art and music.”

In the past year, he connected the dots between design and music with Sangita, a website and application that can transcribe audio into musical notes in real-time. Plus, Sangita allows the option to toggle between notes on a standard Western music scale or Carnatic, which is oriented around a traditional type of music from southern India. Did we mention that Iyengar was into fusion? Oh yeah, it’s also entirely free to use.

The idea of the app came about as Iyengar was attempting to learn and transcribe a piece of classical Indian composition, Balasarasa Murali by Oothukadu Venkata Kavi.

“I was at a stage in my music process where my ears were not as advanced as my feeling,” he says. “I could feel the gap between the detail I wanted to sing and what I was doing, but I couldn't really hear it. So the original intent was to design a tool to help me close that gap, but as the project went on, it took on a bit of a life of its own.”

He took the idea to Logan Zartman, who he describes as his “creative partner” throughout Sangita’s development and his many other art and technology experiments. After months of experimenting and prototyping the concept, the product has come together as two separate webpages for the two scales, complete with a live tuner and recording option as you sing. In addition, Sangita offers a library of classic raga songs, which are traditional improvisational frameworks for Indian music.
“It is important to me that the project remains transparent in where information about ragas comes from,” Iyengar says. “Carnatic music is largely decentralized, and while I used to see it as a problem to solve, I have met many brilliant teachers from different schools and their unique approaches to music are as many in number as personalities in a room. Homogenizing that would result in the loss of something important in how humans interact with art and study it.”

Overall, the app looks and operates incredibly well, but Iyengar still considers it a work in progress. Further updates are sure to come. For the time being, he’s using the tools at his disposal and of his own design for his own art.

“One of the main ways I use Sangita is to transcribe Carnatic scales to Western notation in my collaborations with jazz musicians,” he says. “It also aligns with the mission of bringing this form to as many people as possible, including those with a Western classical foundation.”

Learning and playing the style with musicians who weren’t raised in it was difficult enough, but Iyengar’s old habit of transcribing ragas purely by his own hand and voice was too grueling to continue. Naturally, the multihyphenate created a multiuse platform to solve his own problem, inspiring other artists to use it and learn from it.

Sangita remains free to use and accessible on any device using a browser.

“The Carnatic melodic system is incredibly beautiful,” he says. “If we can create a tool that helps people appreciate that, I would consider that a huge success."