A scientific understanding of music must begin by taking into account how minds act in the ambiance of music. Music like speech is also a mode of communication between human beings. The communicator endeavors to communicate certain messages, be it mood, feelings, expression and the like. Through this he creates a story, a sort of ambiance for the audience. In a sense music appears to be a more fun
damental and universal phenomena than speech. In speech communication the listener has to know the language of the speaker to get the message. In creating music an artist produces an objective material called sound. The semiotics in music consists of lexicon (chalan, pakad), syntax (raga), pragmatics (thaat, gharana) and semantics (mood, feeling, emotion). Thus if science has to probe music it has to take into account these semiotics, the cognitive processes taking place in the mind along with the acoustics of it. As in the case of a language, the semiotics here also is completely language-dependent. This needs to be borne in mind when one takes up a particular music for study. A comprehensive scientific approach therefore needs to address the physical users. It appears that the public reposes faith in the modern scientific approaches. The physical data in research in speech and music being of natural origin, a significant amount of mathematical modeling is non-deterministic in nature. Except for the primary mandatory signal processing aspects to extract parameters, the rest of the analysis has to rely largely on stochastic as well as non-stochastic random mathematical approaches like chaos and fractals. In fact, it often happens that new paradigm of mathematical approaches have to be resorted to, which often brings clarity to the mathematical non-deterministic approaches. We apprehend that Sir C V Raman Centre for Physics and Music, Jadavpur University, would continue to unfold novel interactions of science, technology and mathematics with the faculties of mind like expressions, impressions and feeling and ultimately lead to a paradigm of research, to unify matter and mind.
The centre removes the existing vacuum in the country for comprehensive fundamental scientific research in the area of music and speech that was pioneered in the country by
Sir C V Raman. The centre also provides necessary platform to individual researchers in other organisation for infrastructural as well as knowledge resources.
The Centre also fills up the existing void in the important domain of societal behaviour in scientific approach towards objectively analysing traditional musical culture of the country and creating knowledge bases for these. This will also provide technology bases for enumeration, analysis and study of various kinds of indigenous, folk and tribal musical instruments used in different communities.
The creation of acoustic databases for music including tribal ones and the understanding of its course of development will be another area of interest.
The centre will provide basic knowledge as an input to information and media technology using the most natural mode of human communication and act as a resource centre for necessary data bases for the indigenous development and bench-marking all kinds of technology in the area of speech and music.
The centre provides facilities and assistance to the development of human resource in the area through short term courses, lectures, seminars and workshop. All these require multidisciplinary input from various disciplines of science technology and even some disciplines of humanities. Such a centre can only be effective only in the environment of a dynamic and large university like Jadavpur University.
