Digital music archive to open at Ganabharati on Sept 6

A music archive has been set up at Ganabharati, in association with TAG Corporation Chennai and Madras Music Academy (MMA).

This is a listening device, in which the listener can select any composition or any singer or even any full concert too.  The facility consists of ten consoles of computers, which are operated individually by the end user.

It is donated by TAG Corporation, Chennai.  MMA has donated 1000 hours of music to this system.  The remaining infrastructure has been provided by Ganabharati, through the patronage of Ganabharati’s well wishers.

N Murali, president. MMA and senior managing director of Kasturi and Sons will declare the archives open on September 6 at 5.30 pm. Suttur seer Shivaratri Deshikendra Swami will launch the Ganabharati Web site.

 Dr Pappu Venugopala Rao, Secretary, MMA and  R T Chari, Member, MMA and the donor of the systems will be the guests of honour, said Ganabharati president Dr C G Narasimhan addressing a press conference, here on Monday.

Musical archives

A connoisseur of music may some time desire to listen to a singer of yesteryear, remembering nostalgically a Kambodhi or a Kalyani sung by a particular singer in a music festival or on some other occasion.

However, to retrieve a desired song, they will have to search from their collection of tape or CD in their possession, which will take considerable time.

  In this fast era nobody has such ‘time’ to spend locating a particular song, whatever may be the type of indexing they might have made, he said.

Collection

R T Chari, an electrical engineer, running an electrical industry from Chennai, is one such person, who has a whopping collection of 22,000 hours of music in his possession.

After the advent of the electronic media, he was struck with the idea of digitising his collection and putting them on a computer memory, so that he can retrieve a desired song at the click of a button.

He first sorted them out under many different headings, indexed them properly.  Thus was born TAG digital listening device, under TAG Corporation, in 2008, TAG being the acronym for Tiruvengadachari and Gopalan, his brother,said Dr Narasimhan.

Sharing mind

Chari’s ‘sharing mind’ was not satisfied by setting up the listening device at the Academy, which would be available to only a small section of the society.

 Such devices were subsequently established in the halls of Departments of Music, University of Madras and University of Hyderabad, Gayana Samaja of Bengaluru, Indian Fine Arts Society, Singapore. Now this facility has been set up at Ganabharati, Mysore, he said.

Vice president Prof Ramprasad, secretary Krupa Padke, joint secretary Dr T P Krishnakant, members S R Krishnamurthy and P Vishwakumar were present.