Decoding India’s earliest notation: quantitative approaches to a 7th-century inscription: Richard Widdess (SOAS), Marcus Pearce (QMUL), Alberto Alcala Alvarez (UNAM) and Pablo Padilla (UNAM)

Musical notation in South Asia has historically been associated with pedagogy and music theory. The earliest surviving example is a 7th-century rock inscription at Kuḍumiyāmalai, in South India, recording seven extended melodies in seven different modes. With a total of some 2,400 musical notes, this source is considerably more informative than any comparable musical document from ancient Greece or Mesopotamia. Explicitly didactic, the inscription is believed to comprise exercises in modal composition and in instrumental playing. This unique source contributes to our understanding of the musical theory and practice of the period, and on the dissemination of music and instruments from India to East and South-east Asia in the 6th and 7th centuries.

The first aim of our project (in progress) is to produce a digitised text of the inscription, allowing ourselves and others to interrogate the notation using quantitative methods. We address three main questions: does this approach support the interpretation of the notation proposed by Widdess (Musica Asiatica 2, 1981)? Can the notation be further understood as a fingering system for harp? And what light does a statistical and graph/network-theoretical approach shed on the musical style, modal structure, and compositional principles of the melodies?

Biographies

Alberto Alcalá Alvarez is a doctoral researcher at the Institute for Applied Mathematics and lecturer at the Faculty of Science, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico.

Marcus Pearce is leader of the Music Cognition Lab at Queen Mary University of London, Honorary Professor of Neuroscience at Aarhus University, Denmark, and lead developer on the IDyOM project. His research interests revolve around computational modelling of perception especially in complex auditory domains such as music.

Pablo Padilla is professor of mathematics at the Institute for Applied Mathematics (IIMAS) of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, where he  also teaches at the Faculty of Music. His research interests include nonlinear analysis, mathematical modeling, and formal methods in musicology.

Richard Widdess is Emeritus Professor of Musicology at SOAS University of London. His research interests include the history and theory of music in South Asia, analysis of world music, and cross-cultural music cognition.