MalayalaSangeetham.info/Old
Contents
- 1 Malayalasangeetham.info (MSI)
- 2 Why MalayalaSangeetham ?
- 3 Malayalasangeetham elsewhere
- 4 What can you do with MSI ?
- 5 Key Contributors to MSI
- 6 How do people reach us?
- 7 Frequently Asked Questions
- 8 Of Raagas, Notations and Nuances of composing tunes based on Carnatic notes
- 9 Typical legend for song notations
Malayalasangeetham.info (MSI)
MalayalaSangeetham which translates to Malayalam Music, is the name of the site that brings together the information on the songs created for movies/musicals during the past 80 years ever since its inception in the 1930s. Malayalam is one of the key languages in India spoken by about 50 million people worldwide. It is one of the 23 official languages in India.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malayalam_language
This particular website http://www.malayalasangeetham.info lets you find out, understand, analyze and assimilate the trends and the pulse of all the songs ever created for musicals in this language. This is a not-for-profit site that is maintained by a worldwide network of malayalees (people who speak this language) and continuous updates are made to the site 24x7 by its contributors.
Why MalayalaSangeetham ?
MalayalaSangeetham.info is a one-stop shop on the internet, to get historical information on songs compiled for malayalam movies. There are several sites on the internet where you can listen to streaming malayalam music for free, download them for a fee or check out new movie releases before you buy the CD. However when it comes to historical information regarding themusic itself, there are very few well maintained sites that provides insights into times and works of the creators of this great genre of music. MalayalaSangeetham.info is a non-profit effort to address this specific issue.
Malayalasangeetham elsewhere
If you travel through the internet you can find malayalasangeetham or MSI as it's popularly known as being referenced in many places. A good example is Orkut, a popular social networking site for young Malayalees
http://www.orkut.com/UniversalSearch.aspx?origin=box&exp=1&q=malayalasangeetham
Similarly there is a small group of enthusiasts in yahoo @
http://launch.groups.yahoo.com/group/malayalasangeetham/ Some comments and perspectives from the administrator is available on the blogspot @
http://malayalasangeetham.blogspot.com
What can you do with MSI ?
Typical music lovers who merely loves to listen to music might ask what they can get from MSI.
You cannot listen to music in MSI ! My guess is that about 50% of music lovers will drop off right away. Ok, you can neither see the lyrics of the songs (at least for now). Now, that takes out another 30% of the music lovers. So we have the rest, and they would love MSI because this is a site for the serious malayalam music lover.
Here are some of the things you could do with MSI
In addition to the Movies and Songs database, there are several other related resources provided in this website A list of unreleased movies as well a list of Dubbed movies along with their songs information are provided by some of our major information contributors More than a 100 Pattupusthakams from 1950s, 75s, 70s and 80s are available for browsing An exclusive Photo Gallery of malayalam music personalities is being built by several of our active members listed above As an experiment, we have started building a list of Tharangini Album Songs and KPAC Drama Songs. The information is provided by many of our regular contributors.
Here are the key links directly:
Key Contributors to MSI
Our most significant contributors till date are Shakeeb Vakkom,Rajagopal,KV Nair,Adarsh KR,Nityananda, Vipin Nair, Venugopal, Krishna Chandra, Devi Pillai and Latha Nair . Without their regular and countless updates, this infobase would have been just a fraction of what it is today.
The effort real got the impetus in 2005-2006 due to the efforts of contributors like Sreejith, Deepak, KV Nair, Adarsh M, Raycas, Hari P, Vishal, Arun S
Nithin Rajan and Devi Pillai are our other admins besides me. Nithin helps us in all updates while Devi's expertise is in the lyrics world. In addition to adding a huge number of lyrics in malayalam and Manglish Devi currently administers our lyrics section also verifying the existing lyrics for accuracy and continuously adding new lyrics
Vishal (USA,India)compiled the original Movie Directors Database for this site. Likewise, Deepak (India) created the Unreleased Movies list and continues to maintain it. Adarsh KR(Dubai) is our Raga expert-at-large.
Anoop (UK) has been providing a lot of UI changes that will make your overall experience better than it was in the past
Latha Nair (US) provided us with a huge set of malayalam lyrics. The accuracy and perfection of her contributions have been immense.
Dr Sajikumar (Kerala) contributed several original old paattupusthakams from his collection. He meticulously scanned the whole lot spending immense amount of time and energy for MSI. We are forever indebted to him for his contributions.
All these give you great ways to add more interesting dimensions to your analysis process by customizing your searches
Malayalasangeetham.info owes immeasurable gratitude to the time and efforts of Adarsh KR, Adarsh M,Ajay N,Anagha,Anoop K, Anoop Manayath, IC Andrews,Arun S, Ashwin S, Babu, Balu, Bussy Paul, KN Chandrasekharan,Cini TJ, Deepak, Desert Camel, Dilip, Devi Pillai,DreamzGalaxy, Francis TJ, George, Girish AV, Hamzakutty,Harry S Anchan,Hari Kumar, Jayalakshmi R, Jayan G Kollam,Jayashree, Krishna Chandra, Latha N,Mini Iyer,Mizhineer,Nandu,Navneeth, KV Nair, Nityananda, Pattinte Palazhi, PP Kabeer,Nithin Rajan, Prema Shalimar, Premkumar P, Praveen, Radhankr, Rajagopal K, Raycas,Riju Atholy, Sanuda, Santhosh V, Sasi, TPH Sankar,Sasikumar N, Shakeeb Vakkom, Shijo M, Siva Prasad S, Sree, Sreejith K, Sreenath, Sujathayur, Sujith Sivanand, Sunish Menon, Sunny Joseph, AG Suresh, Suresh, Suresh M, Susy, Venu, Vijayakrishnan VS, Vaisakh, Vikas, Vikas Venattu, Vinu VS, Vipin Nair, Vishal R,Vivek
Our Lyrics contributors are Ashwin K, Latha Nair, Devi Pillai, Adarsh KR,Vijayakrishnan VS,Suresh Menon, Prema Menon, Mini Iyer,Vikas,Fr Thommy,Raju George,Dr Saji Kumar, Sushanth B, Sree Nilakanta, Harikrishnan Nair,Jayan G Kollam,Balu,SV/giltachy,Sasi, Nandu,Robinson, Saskumar N, Indu, Amal A, Charles, Anagha,Susy etc... In addition, several anonymous users have also contributed to our large collection of lyrics
How do people reach us?
It looks like most people get to MSI by simply going to google and typing "Malayalam Music Database"
Yahoo users get to us by doing searches like the ones shown below
Frequently Asked Questions
How to use MSI ?
Using The Tabs Above
Tabs are the recommended way to navigate through MalayalaSangeetham.info
If your page is rendering correctly, you should see three tabs on the top of this page (Home, Songs & Movies). When you select a tab, that particular tab is highlighted, and you will be able to perform the actions as described below.
Home tab is the entry point to the website. You will be able to see some welcome information
Songs tab provides you all the songs related information. The default page of the songs tab is the search page. You are provided a text box to type in some pattern and select where this pattern should be searched. For example, if you want to find all songs starting with the pattern kala, you just type in the word kala on the songs page and select Song Start (which is the default selection). Then you can click on the Find Songs button to find the songs you are looking for. You can perform detailed searches by first creating a list of all the songs you want, and then clicking through various names under different columns
Movies tab provides you all the movies related information. The default page of the movies tab is the search page. Unlike the songs page you are provided with various filtering options and text boxes to customize your search upfront.
In addition to the tabs, various links are provided at the top of the page to Search, Browse, Plot Trends, Submit Change Requests and so on for both Songs and Movies Pages.
Search link is one of the most versatile ones. When you first click on this tab, you are presented with a bar chart that classifies the malayalam movies by decades from 1920s to 2000s. By clicking on any of the bars on the chart you can see information specific to that decade. Or, you can select anything you know about what you are searching on the top right of the page. Here you can specify things like the Name of a movie (full or part) , Year in which the movie released (if you are not sure exactly the year of release, but knows that it is in 1970s, you could merely say 197), Select a Music Director name from the list of names available , or Select a Lyricist name from the list of lyricists available
On the songs search page, you can sort any of the columns in ascending or descending order. On the movie search page, you can click on the title of any of the columns to sort that column in ascending order
Browse link is to be used primarily if you are not sure what you are looking for, but want to get a few indicators. When you click on this tab, data is generated for every music director and lyricist ever worked in a malayalam movie and the specific movies they have worked on is then only a click away. Just like in the search option, you need to click on the number next to the name to see the complete list of movies.
Trends link gives you essential insights into the world of malayalam music industry. You can basically answer questions like who were the most prolific writers for a particular music director, or vice-versa. After you make your selections, you are provided with a pie-chart that you can click further to generate the kind of information you might want to know. I have never found an analysis tool similar to this for any kind of music, let alone malayalam music.
Change link is what we, as the creators of this site is mostly interested in. I am counting on thousands of malayalam music fans to contribute to this site by providing their knowledge and information in a way that could be of use to all of us. As you can see from the Home page of MalayalaSangeetham.info that we still have a long way to go before we get the data for all movies ever released in malayalam. The Change tab, provides two ways to contribute to improving the data integrity of everything you see here.
First, when you create a list of movies using the search functions from the Search tab, you will see a link at the end of every line that says Request Change. If you feel the information provided there is incomplete or incorrect, fixing that is simply a click away for you. When you click on that link, you will have an option of updating the data. Note that this update is not real-time, but could take upto 24 hours or so, as we will validate the changes before updating the database
Second option is for you to download whole sets of data you are interested in updating. There are 4 links on the the Change page, one each of modifying various incomplete classes of incomplete data in MalayalaSangeetham.info. If you are so inclined, you can download these .csv files that can be edited using any spreadsheet program (like MS-Excel). Once you are done with your edits, you can simply email the document to me , and I will provide you the credits on this site and make the updates to databases as soon as possible.
Data & Analysis
Using various sources, we believe we have more than 98% of all malayalam movies ever released listed on this site. As we go through the process of transliterating Malayalam words to English, it is possible that the way we have represented the movie names are not perfect. Please let us know if you would like to change any of them. Also, at this point of time there are some amount of duplicate movie names on the site, as we have generated most of the information using some automated processes. We are continuously working on removing the duplicates. I have a built-in transliteration process, which I am always open to improving. Please give me your suggestions
Most unique feature of this site is its ability to provide you insights into the past and present of malayalam music and understand the trends. For example, you might wonder who was the most prolific music director in malayalam in the 80s. Informaation like that are very easy to find out from this site.
Search Tab -> Composers Bar on the Bar Chart above 1980s , That's it you will now have this page , that lists music directors and the number of movies they have composed music for. Now, you can go to the next level, the actual movie names itself by clicking on the number next to the MD name
Literally 100s of 1000s of questions like this can be answered using MalayalaSangeetham.Inf
Legal Stuff
To the best of my knowledge, everything that is being on this website is 100% legal. First of all, there are no copyrighted materials on this site. Even the software used for creating all this is created by me personally as well as open source components provided by my ISP. I personally pay the domain registration and site hosting fees. I do not intend to make any profit from this effort other than popularizing malayalam music
I am convinced that an effort like this helps the music lovers, recording industry and the artists eventually. We need more efforts along these lines to generate grassroots level interest in music. This is a tiny effort to help achieve that vision.
Join this effort
We would welcome any malayalam music fan to join and support this effort on a volunteer basis. There are a few critical needs for us at this point Find or create a smart duplicate record remover from a list. Due to the current transliteration (process of writing malayalam names in English), we might have the same movie names spelled differently, making it hard for us to remove duplicates using any kind of automated process. If you are software savvy, we would love to have you contribute a process with which we can remove the duplicate entries in an automated programmatic manner
Obvious help we need is in making sure we move the indicators on the Home Page as close to 100% as possible. As mentioned above, there are two ways in which you can do this. Either changing one entry at a time, by clicking on the "Request Change" link next to the movie information on the "Search" page, or by downloading the Excel files from the Change page and editing them and emailing it back to me
Credits
Several people deserve credit for this site. First and foremost the creators of all those great malayalam music who have inspired people like us to dig deeper into the trends of this to enjoy the music and make our lives better. Specifically I would like to thank the following folks.
The contributors of this site, listed prominently at the top of this page and the songs page deserve the kudos to stick with this concept and to make it work. Thanks Folks ! Shri K Girijavallabhan of Trichur, a great admirer and collector of malayalam music, who first inspired me to think of statistics in malayalam music by creating his 40 year list of malayalam movies Mr. Steven Jobs, CEO of Apple and the iPOD team who changed the way I (and millions of others) thought about music and its role in life My parents, for getting me a lot of those rare songs I have from Kerala My anonymous employer for letting me do all this in more ways than one
Frequently Asked Questions
What is malayalasangeetham.info ?
www.malayalasangeetham.info is an information database of all malayalam movies, its music directors, lyricists and the movie directors
Is it a competition to other music related sites?
No. This site is not a competition to any other sites out there. The information contained here is so unique that there are no sites that are comparable to malayalasangeetham.info
Who makes profit from this effort ?
Actually only the malayalam music lovers make profit from this effort. There is no monetary benefit to anyone. This is a free service provided to improve the appreciation of this type of music.
How do I participate in this grassroots effort?
If you like Malayalam Music, we welcome you to participate in this effort. The help we want is in gathering more information to build our database. You can help us by clicking on the Search or Browser tabs above and sharing your knowledge with us. If you have time and energy, please click on the Change tab, download the spreadsheets, update the information and email it back to 
I have some ideas on how we can improve this site? Who can I share it with?
Please email . I will try my best to work with you to implement your ideas
I see a lot of names listed on the Home Page. Are they all involved with this effort?
Yes. This site is a collaborative effort. The most valuable piece of this site is the information database. All those people are contributing to improve the information on the site and thereby making it more useful for all of us. You can also join that effort
Is there a plan to create a database of all the songs, singers and raagas of malayalam songs instead of just the movies Yes. Certainly. Once we are done with the movie database with music directors and lyricists, the next phase will focus on that. Any help you can provide for building that database is certainly welcome
How do I add a missing movie to the database
Please click on the Change tab above, and then click on the link for adding a new movie. Due to transliteration process the new movie addition will take a few hours to complete
How do I change an incorrect information?
Even though we try our best, it is not easy to get all the information right. We certainly appreciate your efforts to correct this information. There are two ways to do that (1) Search for the movie name and simply click on the Request Change link next to the movie name information. (2) Download the spreadsheet(s) from the Change page, update the information and email it back to
Is there a way to fix incorrect information and duplicates right away without having to Request Change?
Yes. Please contact me to know how to do that.
Is this all legal? Are there copyrighted material on this site?
Yes. This site is completely legal and has absolutely no copyrighted material.
Why do I have minimal Google Ads on the site, if this is truly a not for profit effort ?
We are currently trying Google Ads as a way of covering costs that are incurred for domain name registration, hosting and search engine visibility. The costs incurred are still significantly more than any Ad Dollars generated from this site.
Why Am I Doing This?
I am doing this purely based on my interest in malayalam music. Actually, I am interested in all kinds of music, but since I found a serious hole in having this kind of data and analysis capabilities missing, I wanted to create the information for myself first. Then , gradually I started finding that there are hundreds of other music lovers who might love things like this -- that too for free!, no strings attached
Of Raagas, Notations and Nuances of composing tunes based on Carnatic notes
Written by: Adarsh KR (
)
According to me Raagamalika is a song which has different ragas for different lines of the song {pallavi, anupallavi, charanam1, charanam2…charanam N}
A good example is “Devasabhaathalam “ film : HH Abdhullah
Raagas: Hindolam, Todi, Panthuvarali, Mohanam, Sankarabharanam, Shanmukhapriya, Kalyani, Aahir Bhairav/Chakravakam, Revathi
Hindolam: aa.aa.aa.aa…. Dhevasabhaathalam raagilamaakuvaan Naadhamayookhame swaagatham Swagatham swaagatham
Thodi: Dhevasabhaathalam raagilamaakuvaan Naadhamayookhame swaagatham Swagatham swaagatham Sarigamapa rigamapadha gamapadhani Mapadhanisa sanidhapa magaarisa sa Shadjam
Panthuvarali: Sarigamapadha sarigamapadhanisa sanidhapamapa sanidhapamagarisa saa mayoora naadham swaramaay vidarum shadjam anaahadha manthram mayoora nadanam layamaay theliyum shadjam adhaara naadham
pama gamadha ni ni sarigamapadhanisari ree
Rishabham
Mohanam: Rishabha swarangalaay pourushamekum Siva vaahaname nandhi Hrudhayaanandamekum risheegagamaam Swara sanjayame nandhi
Sariga pagarisari gapadhapagari sarigapa Sadhapagari dhasariga padha sarigaa ga Gaandhaaram
Mohanam: aa…..aaa…..aaaa Santhoshakaaraka swaram swaram swaram swaram Ajarava gaandhaaram gaandhaaram gandhaaram Aamodhakaaraka swaram Sundhara gaandaaram gaandhaaram gaandhaaram
Shankaraabharanam: Sarigamapadhanisareeri rigama rigama Madhyamam
Shanmukhapriya: Krouncham sruthiyilunarthum niswanam madhyamam sarigamapadhanisa garisanidhapadhani maadhavam sruthiyilinangum kaarunnyam madhyamam
Kalyani: mamama manidha papapa magari ninini rigama paa Panchamam
Kalyani: pa ma pa sa pa ni dha pa pa pa pa pa
panchamam vasantha kokila swanam swanam kokila swanam vasantha kokila swanam
Kalyani: dhanisa padhani mapadha gamapa rigamapadhanisarigarisanidhapamagamapadhanisa megharaagangale thottunaroonnatha manjooosha manthram dhaivatham aswaravanjangal aanjya chakrathilunarthum swara roopam dhaivatham
Aahir Bhairav/Chakravakam: sarigamapadhanisa dhanisa padhanisa mapadhanisa gama padh ni ni Nishaadham
Aahir Bhairav/Chakravakam: aa….aaa…..aaa….. gajamukhanaadham santhwana bhaavam aagama japalaya nishaadha roopam ni ni ni ni santhamaay pozhiyum swarajala kanangal ekamaay ozhukum gangaa pravaaham
Revati: dhidhidhi thadhi dhidhi kidadhi dhidhi thadhi dhidhi kidadhi dhidhi thadhi dhidhi thaka thaana nanana thiki thaka thaananana thiki thaka thaananana
anuthathamudhatha swaritha prajayam thandava mukharalaya prabhavam pranavakaaram sangeetham
aa nomtha nomtha nomtha (repeat)
aanandam ananthaanandham jagathaanandam sangeetham (aanandham)
marisanipa risaasa risanipama sa ni ni sanipamari ri pa pa marisanipa ri sa risanipama sa ni sanipamari ni pa marisanipa ri risanipama sa sanipamari ni marisanipa risanipama sanipamapa risanipama sanipamari nipamarima sanipamari nipamarisa sarimapani
aanandam ananthaanandham jagathaanandam sangeetham (anandam) samgeetham sangeetham sangeetham
In karnatik music Raaga is strictly followed in krithi/keerthanam, But in Film/light music it is not necessary to follow a raga through out a song
In many songs Music directors use a main raga and mix with other ragas or use extra note{ annya swaram}. In this case we cannot say that it is in Raagamalika.
Eg:- song: Kaayamboo kannil
Devarajan master composed this song in Mohanam, but it has annya swaram{which is not belong to Mohana raagam} in some portion of the song
Mohanam and kalyani are often mixed in many songs. But we can not say that it is in MohanaKalyaani raagam. {Mohanakalyani has swaras of Mohanam as well as Kalyani and has its own bhaavam and Sanchaaras}
Madhyamaavathi and Sreeraagam are similar raagams. Both raagams have same aarohanam{same swaras in aarohanam}
Main difference between these two raagams is Sree raagam has Ga which is not available in Madhyamavathi
&
Sreeraagam has some unique swara path {“Sanchaaram/Prayogam”} Eg:- Ri Ga Ri Sa
Madhyamaavathi has no Ga
But in some Madhyamaavathi based film songs have “Ga” in some portion. But it doesn’t mean that the song is in Sreeraagam !
It is composers choice to mix Raagas to get a good tune.
Song: “Kalpaantha kaalatholam” may have both Madhyamavathi and sreeraagam , but it is not a raaagamalika song.
if pallavi has Madhyamavathi and charanam or anupallavi tuned completely in Sreeraagam, then it will be a Raagamalika
Typical legend for song notations
Written by Adarsh KR (
)
No-SwaraRepresentation-SwaraName-WesternNotation 1- S = Shadjam = C 2- R1 = Shudhdha rishabham = C# 3- R2/G1 = Chathushruthi rishabham/ Shudhdha Gandharam = D 4- G2/R3 = Sadarana Gandharam/ Sathshruthi Rishabham = D# 5- G3 = Anthara Gandharam = E 6- M1 = Shudhdha Madhyamam = F 7- M2 = Prathi Madhyamam 2 = F# 8- P = Panchamam = G 9- D1 = Shudhdha dhaivadham = G# 10- D2 /N1= Chathushruthi dhaivadham/ Shudhdha Nishadam = A 11- N2/D3 = Kaishika Nishadam/ Sathshruthi Dhaivadham = A# 12- N3 = Kakali nishadam = B S = sa = C [next octave; higher "sa"]
