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Dec 5, 2022Liked by Gandhar Mahadeshwar

Absolutely top class lad right here!

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DC = legend

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Nov 26, 2022·edited Nov 26, 2022Liked by Gandhar Mahadeshwar

Unbelievable that this is your first blog. This was really well done despite me definitely struggling to understand a lot of the technical jargon. Looking forward to seeing more of your journey in this incredible field. Now waiting on Drakes next album… times are indeed tough.

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Nov 24, 2022Liked by Gandhar Mahadeshwar

Love u Gandhar

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Nov 24, 2022Liked by Gandhar Mahadeshwar

Nice, Gandhar! This will take repeated readings to 'digest'. For now I'm just glad your intellect has found a perfect habitat.

Is it a similar, albeit less in scope world of possibilities when you try to fit phrases in say bageshri or yaman into the confines of an ektaal or jhaptal avartan? The more evolved the musician, wider is the myriad of possibilities he sees and also bigger the domain of the raga rules that limit them.

And how about the Surya phenomenon which has been making perfect picks from an ever expanding set of shots, all in fractions of a second! Sure the bowling community is already on an overdrive developing antibodies against the for-now invincible SKY-protein. Enjoy...

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Nov 25, 2022·edited Nov 26, 2022Author

Thanks for reading, Kaka! That's a really interesting thought; it's certainly true that trying to fit phrases from a thaat or raga into a particular taal is an artform. Not only is the artist trying to abide by the rules of the 'parent composition', but they must also take care to evoke a "mood" or theme, and then on top of that, be creative to generate novel ideas. The best musicians are able to do all of this, and I think their method to do so is strikingly similar to the ideas discussed in this post. A lot of experience/pattern recognition in the musician's brain leads to rapid finding of a locality of possible phrases to incorporate (esp. during improvisation), then creativity comes into play, letting the artist settle on a locally optimal phrase.

If we were able to quantify the "creativity" of a particular composition or phrase, and somehow ensure that it abides by the mood and rules of the thaat/raga, we could imagine creating a statistical learning framework that uses our 'creativity measure' as a loss function to generate such compositions computationally. It's an interesting thought experiment. Would be cool to see if, as in chess, creative ideas that humans have come up with are recreated by such an algorithm.

As for SKY, he's on a different plane of existence right now where probabilities and "high-percentage cricket" don't really seem to matter! :)

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Brilliant post Gandarbhai! Seems analogous to the principle of least action (searching all possible paths and selecting the one that minimizes the action) vs local, Laplacian paradigm in physics. Looking forward to more insightful posts! Keep up the great work! :)

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