On Music
Can a raga be seen?
Raag Yaman in a single still image — and why I think ragas deserve a visual language of their own.
“ये मन जो चाहे वही यमन है”
Whatever the mind desires, that is Yaman.
— A saying attributed to the sitar maestro Abdul Halim Jaffer Khan
We have written them down in notation. We have sung them, taught them, analysed them and, for centuries, even painted their moods. Yet I had never come across an attempt to paint the music itself — not the emotion it evokes, but the grammar that makes it what it is.
So I tried.
This is not an illustration of Yaman. It is not a spectrogram, a waveform, or an AI-generated abstraction. Every mark corresponds to something a musician actually does. The painting is an attempt to translate the language of Hindustani music into a visual one — one where pitch, ornamentation, hierarchy, time and movement all become part of a single image.
The trouble with writing a raga down
If you write Yaman in sargam, you get the notes and almost none of the life. Notation faithfully records what is sung, but says very little about how it is sung. Yet that “how” is where a raga lives.
A swara is rarely struck directly. It may be approached through a long meend, brushed in passing as a kan, allowed to breathe with an andolan, or shaken with a forceful gamak. Two musicians may sing exactly the same notes, yet produce entirely different musical and emotional experiences because the journey between those notes is different.
A beginner memorising Ni Re Ga Ma Dha Ni Sa learns the alphabet. The language remains elsewhere.
That missing language became the starting point for this exploration.
Why a spiral?
Yaman belongs to the first quarter of the night, and I wanted the entire visual language to emerge from that world. The obvious canvas wasn’t paper — it was the night sky. Seen from Earth, the night sky is full of bodies moving in graceful arcs around invisible centres. Galaxies spiral around dense cores. Planets orbit stars. Moons orbit planets. Gravity holds everything together without ever being seen. That felt remarkably close to the way a raga behaves.
Every phrase in a raga may wander, explore, hesitate or leap, but it is always defined by its relationship to Sa. The tonic is never merely the first note; it is the centre of gravity around which the entire performance revolves. You leave it only to find your way back. The farther you travel, the more its presence is felt. The spiral is a way of making that invisible pull visible.
At its centre sits Sa, quiet and unmoving. Time flows outward rather than across the page. The innermost turns hold the slow, contemplative ālāp. As the performance gathers momentum, the spiral expands through madhya laya, eventually reaching the fast, energetic drut passages at the rim. Reading the painting becomes a journey away from — and repeatedly back toward — the tonic, much as listening to a raga does.
The celestial metaphor extends beyond the geometry. Each swara becomes a point of light against an indigo sky. Important notes glow like bright stars. Sustained notes gather luminous halos, almost like planets. Fast taans streak briefly across the page like meteors before disappearing into the larger constellation. The intent was not to make the painting resemble a galaxy, but to let it borrow the same visual language of orbit, gravity and light that makes the night sky feel both ordered and infinite. For a raga that has been sung under evening skies for centuries, it felt like a natural home.
Why these colours?
Yaman is traditionally performed after sunset, and the deep indigo background comes directly from that association. It is intended to evoke the night sky — not as a literal landscape, but as the emotional space the raga inhabits. Against that darkness, every swara becomes a point of light. The important notes shine brighter, just as certain stars dominate a constellation. Ga, the vadi, becomes a warm golden light — the visual centre of gravity after Sa. Ni, the samvadi, answers in a cooler moonlit white. The lone Tivra Ma appears in vermilion, immediately distinguishing itself from every other note. It is the one swara that gives Yaman its unmistakable colour, and it deserved its own.
The colours are therefore both musical and celestial. They identify notes, but they also transform the performance into a kind of star map.
Why ink?
Western notation treats a note almost as a point: a pitch held for a duration. That model breaks down almost immediately in Hindustani music. Here, a note is rarely an isolated event. It is a gesture. Ink proved to be the perfect medium because ink remembers movement.
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A brush loaded with water pools where the hand slows down. Dry bristles skip across the paper when the hand accelerates. A single stroke preserves not only its final shape but also the speed, pressure and confidence with which it was made. Music behaves similarly.
A lingering ālāp leaves broad, wet marks. Fast taans become dry, broken streaks. Long meends stretch into tapered arcs. Gamak compresses into dense oscillations. Every ornament develops its own visual vocabulary. The intent is that every mark behaves the way the musical gesture behaves.
Building a visual grammar
Once each ornament acquired its own brushstroke, the rest of the language followed naturally.
The spiral encodes the passage of time. The colours identify individual swaras. The size of each mark reflects musical hierarchy. Ga, the vadi, carries greater visual weight than passing notes. Dha, which rarely serves as a resting place in Yaman, appears only as brief streaks. Notes sustained for longer bloom into larger pools of ink. Fast passages fragment into lighter marks.
Even the direction of a stroke carries information. A clean attack differs visibly from a gliding meend. A kan hooks into the destination. Andolan breathes. Gamak vibrates. Every visual decision attempts to preserve a musical one.
Other works on visualising ragas
The desire to see music is hardly new. For centuries, the Ragamala tradition painted ragas as kings, lovers, ascetics and monsoon landscapes. Those extraordinary miniatures captured the emotional world of a raga — its season, deity, time of day and poetic mood — but not its musical structure.
More recently, researchers have visualised ragas using pitch distributions, transition graphs, clustering algorithms and machine learning. These reveal remarkable analytical insights into melodic behaviour, but they remain scientific diagrams rather than visual experiences.
One of my own inspirations came from Nicholas Rougeux’s Off the Staff, which transforms Western scores into beautiful spirals of coloured dots.
Reading the painting
Because the goal was to build a readable language rather than an abstract artwork, the painting is accompanied by a complete reference sheet.
The reference sheet names every note, numbers every phrase and preserves the complete sequence of the performance. The artwork and the reference are intended to be viewed together. One invites contemplation. The other explains why the image looks the way it does. Together they describe not just what was sung, but how the music moved through time.
Why bother?
When musicians describe a raga, they often speak in images. Yaman is spacious. Darbari is weighty. Marwa is restless. Bhairav belongs to dawn. These descriptions are poetic because there has never been another language available.
I began to wonder whether a visual one could exist alongside the musical one — not replacing notation or performance, but complementing them. A notation tells us what happened. A recording lets us hear it again. Perhaps an image can let us see the whole performance at once. Yaman became the first experiment.
What comes next
Every raga possesses its own internal geometry. Darbari should not spiral quite like Yaman. Marwa may refuse symmetry altogether. Malkauns should breathe differently. Bhairav should carry the stillness of dawn rather than the openness of night. I don’t want to produce a collection of decorative posters. I want to build a visual atlas of Hindustani music — one where every raga develops its own geometry, palette and brush language while remaining faithful to its grammar. If that atlas succeeds, perhaps one day someone will recognise a raga not only by hearing it, but by seeing it.
And perhaps, just perhaps, Yaman really was hiding in the night sky all along.
A lot of ideas on this were given by Mustafa Saifee. Follow his work https://mustafasaifee.dev/
