Disclaimer: The views expressed in this home page are purely personal and don't reflect those of the organization or institute I work for.
I'm a research engineer in Bangalore. I did my schooling in Bishop Cotton Boys' School, Bangalore and my B-Tech in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IITM). I've submitted my masters thesis at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore (IISc) and hope to carry on for a Ph.D.
My background being Electrical Engineering, I look for research opportunities where DSP can be used. But, my real interest lies in analyzing music. I have some cribs against current Carnatic music theory, which I hope to partially clear up using DSP. I've done some work , which has gone into my masters thesis. More on this. You can also look
at a similar page. But, that doesn't preclude other Signal processing applications, viz. communication technologies. I've worked on the V5.2 (telephony) protocol as well as the 3G Physical layer.
A. S. Ilango, V Venkatasubramanian, D. Jalihal and K. Giridhar, "Near Optimal Low Complexity Joint Estimation of Cochannel ISI Signals"; IEEE 49th VTC 1999, vol. 2, pp. 1330 - 1334.
Venkatasubramanian V, K R Ramakrishnan, H V Sahasrabuddhe, "Music Information Retrieval Using Continuity,"
Proceedings of the Symposium on the Frontiers of Research on Speech and Music (FRSM 2004), Annamalai University, Chidambaram, Jan 2004, pp. 74-83
In one line, I'm a die-hard fan of M D Ramanathan, who in my opinion, is the best singer of the last century. But, that's part of the larger interest in Carnatic music, Madurai Mani Iyer and Mali being my other favourites. I'm a self-taught musician that can play the flute and sing without everyone rushing ears-closed out of the room. Some people say that I sing like MDR.
Compositions
Recently, I composed three songs (to my own surprise). The first is on the Trinity. The second is on Shiva, but it's no secret that it's about MDR, whom I consider my mAnasika guru. The third is on Lord Ganehsa (should have been first?). You may hear them here:
Ekadantam (463 kB), shrI tyAgarAjamupAsmahE (1.53 MB), rAmanAthambhajE (1.42 MB)
Beware! I've sung them:). I'm hardly confident about the talam in these versions - The best bet for the listener is to take the tune from the singing and the talam from the notation! Hopefully, a "talam-getty" version will come later?
Also, if you modify the song, other than spontaneously, please take the trouble of mailing me about it.
I must thank my friend, Karthik, for extensively helping me with the first song, and especially for making me aware of some of the kriti standards - Dikshitar invariably ensured that long syllables take two beats and short ones take one while Shyama Shastri ensured that each swara (in swara-sahitya) has exactly one akshara in the sahitya.
Apart from music, I like
- Reading fiction (Collins, Doyle, especially Holmes), humour (Wodehouse), philosophy (Advaita) and
religion (Hindu Mythology)
- Languages. Apart from English and Hindi, lyrics of songs and shlokas are my windows to, in order of
decreasing proficiency in understanding only, Tamizh, Kannada, Sanksrit, Telugu.
- Cricket. I'm a big fan of Sachin Tendulkar.
- Tamizh comdey movies/dramas. Fairly fond of S. Vee. Shekar's and Crazy Mohan's dramas.
My wife is a chartered accountant, but right now taking a break.
My father was a brilliant mechanical engineer, also an alumnus of IITM and my mother is an equally brilliant homemaker.
My brother has just finished his BE is a software engineer.
I've few, but trusted, friends. I grew up with Srivatsan Laxman, who now works in the same lab in IISc. as I do, and is the best of them.
