Konnakkol is given its due importance within the circle of Carnatic Percussionists. But this powerful tool for
communication and education in rhythm has a wider scope than its current use.
Konnakkol is yet to achieve its full potential. With this in mind, I am setting up a
program that has a three-fold goal
- to make this unique rhythm language available to the world,
- to unify different schools of this art into a canonical form, and
- to extend its application to percussion systems across the globe.
These formidable tasks can be accomplished only with the combined efforts of the world percussion community.
I invite all percussionists with knowledge of konnakkol or an interest in it to join hands with me.
The following sections tlak about different aspects of the Konnakkol Program.
A Catalog of Konnakkol Lessons
An online catalog of konnakkol lessons forms the core of the Konnakkol Program.
Anyone interested in learning this art can do so by going through the step by step
lessons listed in the main
konnakkol page.
Unification
It is clear that the differences in different konnakkol systems are cosmetic.
The abstract structure and features are fairly identical. It makes sense to unify the
differnt systems if konnakkol is to be developed into a universal rhythm language.
Hopefully the process of unification will become self evident after we collect
a good number of different systems.
Application to World Percussion
This is a task to be taken up by the percussionists of the world who have an interest in konnakkol.
Once they learn konnakkol to some level of proficiency, they can represent their own rhythm concepts
in this new language.
Tools Development
In this world of Information Technology, many applications of the computer come to mind. Here are a few obvious ones:
- konnakkol in ascii - work in progress
- konnakkol in xml
- midi for konnakkol
- text-to-voice software
- voice-to-text software
- authoring/editing software
