Rangula Kala app for iPhone and iPad

If you, like me, will hum a melody and still not know what notes youve hit, or feel moved by a progression of chords and not know the first thing about what happened, the "colorful dream" (Rangula Kala in Telugu) is to articulate in images what we can hear and feel but not describe in music. Not just to give the eye another set of pulsating rainbow baubles, but to use color and shape to pick out melodically subtle yet harmonically important distinctions, and thus to aid the ear in understanding

Long ago, Euler and Newton contemplated the relation of sound to shape and color, but in the waking dream of the twenty first century, we can see these connections in real time. With what we know about the derivatives of the Short time Fourier Transform we can precisely identify pitches, and substantially filter impulses and noise. By smoothing the spectral envelopes of series of partials, we can more accurately identify fundamentals While still a work in progress, Rangula Kala analyzes polyphonic music with tools far beyond a simple DFT.

And yet, if Ive done anything right, I hope that here and there it may be not only useful and thought-provoking, but beautiful, too. When and if it happens, the colors, the music and the dream are a gift from Divya and Srinivasan, and merely passed through my hands.