Achievements

Press Report Bombay Times Tuesday March 26 1996
Plug in and learn to play the tabla

Kedar Kamat(Vile-Parle)

Plug in and learn to play the tabla

Teaching music to a class of 10 to 15 students is no easy task. It is particularly difficult to give individual attention to the students. City-based music teacher Kiran Vyas has found a way around this problem by using a computer to teach music, particularly the tabla. It is a unique method in that it allows students to practise in their homes without the teacher.

Thirty-nine year old Kiran Vyas has been teaching music at the family owned Vyas Sangeet Vidya Mandir in Vile Parle since 1978, The idea of introducing this revolutionary concept in music educations truck Kiran when he heard from a relative visiting the US about digitalised tabla sounds emanating from a PC which helped students learn the instrument.

Kiran then came to know of the Sound Blaster which could convert music-vocal or instrumental-into digitalised sound. He acquired a Sound Blaster and began experimenting on it using the real sounds of a tabla.

How it is accomplished

Once he successfully programmed the real tabla sounds he tasted it among his students-using the computer to teach- and found that the response was overwhelming.

In fact, performance levels shot up. He says that a student who would normally take 10 to 15 sittings to perfect a rachna was now able to do so after just four or five sessions. The tabla is such as instrument that mere reading or learning will not give the student the necessary level of competence, says Kiran Vyas. He has managed feed different tabla scales into the computer which allow him the advantage of having a particular rachna on one scale which can simultaneously be played on all remaining scales.

The students find the computer easy to use also because of the clarity of sound and tone. If students are stuck at a particular phrase which is difficult to understand, they can form a loop of that phrase which can then be played faster, slower or an a higher note continuously or for a few lines, explains Vyas. This enables them to maintain consistency in laya and taal, which gives the computer an edge over the electronic tabla machine available in the market, according to Vyas.

Besides, as the pitch or tone of the tabla matches that of the computer there are no problems of rewinding the tape. Any rachna can be played for any length of time at vanable speeds providing a perfect demonstration to the student as to how a rachna is to be played and how it should sound, says Kiran. He now plans to use the computer to teach hand movements for playing the tabla