Tanpura

The tanpura exposes the structure of notes through a continual variation in its timber. A changing timber helps our ear pay attention to individual harmonic components of the resonant sound. A stagnant timber integrates the harmonic components into a single tone, while a rapidly varying timber amounts to noise. The right variation in timber reveals its own structure, and the tanpura sound is designed to do just that.

The traditional tanpura is designed to help us hear the individual components of its rich tone, and is the best accoustic instrument known for the purpose. But we are not limited by accoustic technology any more. Digital signal processing opens up a whole new world in sound production. Can we better the tanpura sound using DSP? It is certainly worth a try.

Jhankaar is one such attempt. Jhankaar is a modern, experimental version of the tanpura sound with the same goal and principle behind the traditional tanpura but with a slightly different technique for exposing the note structure.

Try Jhankaar for yourself.