Raga Finder

From a sung scale to a raga's name

1. Tap the microphone and allow it. The tool listens to the room for a couple of seconds — stay quiet — and then asks you to sing.
2. Sing the swaras, plainly. The surest way is the scale itself: up from Sa to the higher Sa and back down, slowly, each note held for about half a second, on “aa” or on the swara names. Twice is better than once. A tune you know works too, as long as its notes are held and not only brushed past.
3. Watch “What was heard”. A bar grows over each of the twelve swara positions as you hold a note there. After about eight notes and four different swaras a name appears, with how well it fits.
4. Read the reasons. Under the name the tool says what it based the answer on: whether every note you held belongs to the raga, which of the raga's swaras it never heard, and anything about the way you climbed or came down that does not suit it.
5. Check it by ear. Tap Hear this raga to have its arohana and avarohana played at your Sa. Tap any raga in the list underneath to look at that one instead.

No microphone to hand, or want to test a clip? Check a recording reads an audio file of one voice or one melody instrument and gives the answer for the whole of it (up to the first six minutes). The file is read on your device; it is not played and not uploaded.

Sa: chosen or worked out

Every swara is a distance from Sa, so the answer depends on where Sa is. There are three ways to settle it:

• Work it out from my singing (the setting it opens on). All twelve possible Sas are tried, and the tool takes the one your singing leans on: the note you spend most time on, that has a Pa or a Ma beside it, and that your phrases begin from and come home to. The line under the results says Sa guessed, and offers the other Sas that would also give a clean raga — the same five notes are Mohanam from one Sa and Madhyamavati from another.
• Choose it from the list, G2 to E4, with the kattai number beside each note. Your own Sa need not be exactly on the piano's note: the tool finds how far above or below it you are singing and tells you.
• Set Sa from my voice. Hold your Sa on a steady “aa” for about a second; the note you held becomes Sa.

Once a Sa is set you can switch on the Tanpura, which sounds while the microphone is on. Singing against a drone keeps the swaras where they belong, and the reading is cleaner for it. Use headphones if you can and tick Headphones; through a loudspeaker the tool asks the browser to cancel the drone and is told which notes it is playing, but a loud drone can still be mistaken for a held Sa or Pa.

Because the notes are kept as actual pitches, nothing is lost when you change Sa afterwards: the same singing is read again at once against the new Sa.

What the picture and the words mean

The twelve columns are the twelve swara positions in an octave, starting from Sa: S, R₁, R₂, G₂, G₃, M₁, M₂, P, D₁, D₂, N₂, N₃. When a raga is named they take that raga's own names for the positions — the third column is R₂ in Shankarabharanam but G₁ in Kanakangi. Until a Sa is known they show the Western note names instead.

• Bars show the share of held time on each position; the percentage is under each column. They are teal when the position belongs to the raga on show and coral when it does not.
• The gold line shows where your voice actually was, slides and shakes included, so you can see whether a swara was sung squarely or smeared between two positions.
• A solid line over a column marks a swara of the raga that you sang; a dashed one marks a swara of the raga that has not been heard yet.
• The white marker is your voice at this moment.

The heading over the name says how far to trust it:

The gold box that sometimes appears under the reasons — Same swaras, the same way up and down — lists ragas this tool cannot separate from the one it named. See the limits below.

How a raga is found from a voice

There is no AI model behind this and nothing is sent to a server. It is four plain steps, all done in your browser.

1. Pitch

A sung note is a pattern that repeats a hundred to several hundred times a second. The page takes a short slice of sound and looks for the smallest shift at which the slice lines up with itself again; that shift is one cycle of the note, and its length gives the pitch. It does this about a hundred times a second, for voices from about 65 Hz to 1,100 Hz. It is the same tracker the Swara Singing Trainer draws its pitch graph with.

2. Held notes

Most of those readings are the voice on its way somewhere. A raga's swaras are the places the voice stays, so only the stays are kept: a stretch where the pitch remains within 40 cents for at least a tenth of a second, or — for a note sung with vibrato or a light shake — a stretch that wanders evenly about a still middle, which is taken at its middle. A slow slide that never settles is dropped. No single note counts for more than 0.8 seconds, so one long Sa does not drown the rest.

3. Sa and the twelve positions

Nobody sings exactly at concert pitch, so the tool first finds where your own grid of semitones lies, then places each held note on the nearest of the twelve positions above Sa and adds up the time on each. A position counts as sung once it has about 0.4 seconds and 4% of the total.

4. Asking every raga

Each of the 148 ragas is scored on three things. Time spent on positions the raga does not have counts heavily against it. Each swara of the raga that was never sung counts against it a little — that is what puts Mohanam above Shankarabharanam when only five notes were heard. Last, and only as a tie-breaker, the order of your notes is compared with the raga's arohana and avarohana: climbing onto a swara the raga uses only in descent, or stepping over one it should have touched, counts against it. That is what separates Kambhoji (no Ni going up) from Harikambhoji, and Bilahari from Shankarabharanam.

What it cannot do

A raga is far more than its scale, and this tool hears only the scale. That sets firm limits, and it is better to know them:

• It does not hear gamaka or phrasing. Ragas with the same swaras going up and coming down look identical to it. Arabhi and Devagandhari, Shuddha Dhanyasi and Udayaravichandrika, Jhalavarali and Varali are named together for that reason. Ragas whose difference lies in a zigzag or a characteristic phrase — Sahana, Natakurinji, Reetigowla, Anandabhairavi — may be reported as the plainer raga with the same notes.
• Heavy gamaka hides the swaras. A note shaken by nearly a semitone, as Todi's Ga or Bhairavi's Ni often are, has no still point to read. Sing the swaras plainly for this tool, even if you would never sing the raga that way.
• Fast passages are thin evidence. A note shorter than about an eighth of a second is not held long enough to count.
• One voice at a time. It cannot pick a singer out of an ensemble or a film song with accompaniment.
• A wrong Sa gives a wrong answer. The same notes read from a different Sa are a different raga. When the Sa you chose gives a poor fit and another Sa gives a clean one, the Sa line asks Is that your Sa? and offers the other; if the answer looks strange, look there first.
• It knows 148 ragas. A raga outside the list is reported as its nearest neighbour inside it.

How it has been checked: with a synthesized singer, not yet with people. Given the textbook arohana and avarohana as sound — plain, with light gamaka, with vibrato, and in a noisy room — it named the raga correctly in every trial, and with Sa left to be guessed it found the right Sa in those trials too. With a 90-cent shake on every note it began to miss. Real voices in real rooms will do worse than a synthesizer; how much worse is not yet measured.

The ragas it knows

All 72 melakartas, and 76 janya ragas. Two groups come out identical as the finder holds them — Harikambhoji with Sahana and Natakurinji, and Kedaragaula with Surutti — which leaves 145 it can tell apart by swaras. The janyas are listed here as the finder holds them; the melakartas are in the 72 Melakarta Ragas tool, and sixteen of the best known can be heard with gamaka in the Carnatic Ragas Player.

More music tools: Swara Singing Trainer · Carnatic Ragas Player · Melakarta Ragas · Tanpura · Ear Trainer · All tools