Every raga has an address.
An interactive teaching app for the 72 melakarta ragas of Carnatic music and their janyas — hear the scales, see the swara variants, decode the names, and chase down the songs.
- The Melakarta Wheel — all 72 parent scales arranged the way the tradition arranges them: twelve chakras, the śuddha/prati madhyama split down the vertical axis, and a color system where hue encodes the Ri–Ga family and lightness the Dha–Ni step. Madhyama partners (Sankarabharanam 29 ↔ Kalyani 65) render in the same color at mirrored positions — the system's deepest symmetry, made visible. Press M on a wedge to leap between them.
- Katapayadi, decoded — every mela name secretly encodes its own number
(Kha·ra·harapriya → kha=2, ra=2 → mela 22). The wheel panel decodes each name live, and
/katapayaditeaches the full cipher with the consonant tables and a decoder for all 72 names. - A raga page for every raga — 127 of them: playable arohana/avarohana with the sounding note highlighted in sync, the 16-names-on-12-keys swara strip (see why R₂ and G₁ are the same key), jeeva swaras, characteristic phrases, curated songs (krithis and film songs) with YouTube/Spotify search links, lore, and family cross-links.
- Sound, fully synthesized — no audio files. A Karplus-Strong tanpura drone lives in the wheel's hub; melodic voices (veena-ish pluck, flute) play at your chosen śruti in just intonation (with an equal-temperament toggle for the curious ear).
- Raga seals — each raga gets a visual fingerprint: its pitch-class set as dots on a twelve-position ring, derived from the same data as playback so it can never lie.
npm install
npm run dev # → http://localhost:3000npm run build # static export to ./out — deploys to any static host
npm run validate # the data validation suite (311 tests)Requires Node 20.9+. There are no environment variables, no database, and no backend — the entire site is statically generated.
Carnatic raga data is easy to get subtly wrong, so the architecture is built around machine-checkable honesty:
- Derive everything derivable. A melakarta's scale is pure arithmetic on its number
(
src/lib/carnatic/mela.ts). The hand-transcribed scales insrc/data/melas/exist so the validator can assert they equal the derivation — double-entry bookkeeping for music theory. - Katapayadi is verified two ways. Each mela's syllable breakdown is hand-authored (romanized names are ambiguous — English "ch" is usually ca=6, and the dental ta-varga runs 6…9, 0), then the validator re-derives every digit from the consonant table and checks the reversed number equals the mela number.
- Janya integrity. Every janya scale token must belong to its parent mela's swaras or be explicitly declared as an anya (borrowed) swara; parents must exist; vakra/audava/shadava classifications are computed, not asserted.
- Songs were adversarially fact-checked. Every song–raga attribution was verified against published sources during curation, and anything unverifiable was dropped rather than shipped. Corrections with sources are very welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md.
Run the whole suite with npm run validate.
Next.js 16 (App Router, static export) · React 19 (React Compiler) · TypeScript · Tailwind CSS v4 · Tone.js · Vitest. Typefaces: Eczar and Anek Latin.
src/lib/carnatic/ domain core: types, scale parser, mela derivation, katapayadi, links
src/lib/audio/ tuning (just intonation), engine, voices, tanpura
src/data/ the 72 melas (one file per chakra) + ~55 janyas (by family) + assembly
src/components/ wheel, swara strip, raga seal, sound bar, search
src/app/ routes: / /melakarta /raga/[slug] /ragas /janya /swaras /katapayadi
tests/ known-answer derivation tests + the data validation suite
Corrections to raga data (scales, song attributions, katapayadi readings) are the most valuable contributions and need no coding — see CONTRIBUTING.md.
MIT — built with love for Carnatic music, with blessing from the forefathers.