Mridangam

The mridangam is a double-headed barrel drum and the principal percussion instrument of Carnatic music in South India. It accompanies vocal and instrumental music and South Indian classical dance. The wooden shell bulges at the middle. The player sits with the drum horizontal across the lap and strikes both heads with the hands and fingers.

The black spot on a mridangam is a permanent load on the right, treble head, called soru, saadham or karanai in Tamil usage. Makers bind an iron-bearing mineral powder with cooked rice or rice flour and build it up in many thin layers; Wesleyan records up to 50. The load gives the head a definite pitch and a metallic timbre.

Before playing, a mridangam player presses a temporary paste onto the centre of the left, bass head. Most sources name semolina (rava) or farina mixed with water; one acoustics paper names a wheat paste. The paste lowers the pitch and damps the head, and players top it up during a performance. Some use silicone caulk, modelling clay or rubber gum instead.

A mridangam is tuned by striking the leather straps at the head with a smooth stone, often through a wooden peg placed between the straps. Striking towards the shell raises the pitch; striking from below lowers it. The treble head must sound one pitch all round its edge, checked against a sruti box, pitch pipe or tambura. Because the straps link both heads, one adjustment can shift the other.

The mridangam sounds musical because of the black load on its right head, which gives that head a definite pitch and a metallic timbre. In 1920 C. V. Raman and Kumar showed that the loaded head yields five near-harmonic tones, including the fundamental. Raman and his co-workers later traced those tones to nine normal modes of the loaded membrane.

Students of the mridangam learn rhythm through spoken syllables (sollu) tied to hand positions, without reading notation. Wesleyan counts at least 12 right-hand strokes and three main left-hand strokes: a flat-hand slap, an open bass stroke, and the gumki, in which a wrist slide stretches the skin and raises the pitch. A research dataset distinguishes 10 strokes, including tha, thi, thom and num.

The mridangam is one double-headed barrel drum, played across the lap with both heads struck by the hands. It is the principal percussion of Carnatic music in South India. A widely held tradition says the tabla of Hindustani music came from a mridangam split in two, but this story is unverified. Its closest Hindustani relative is the larger pakhawaj.

Yes, the pakhawaj of Hindustani music is a close relative of the mridangam. Darbar calls the mridangam its prototype and describes the pakhawaj as larger, with a different playing technique. The maddale of Yakshagana and the khol of Bengal are related double-headed drums, though the maddale differs in structure and acoustics from the Carnatic mridangam.

Wesleyan's collection records two mridangam sizes. The lower-pitched taggu shell is about 61 cm long, with openings of about 17 and 20 cm; the higher-pitched hecchu shell is about 56 cm long, with openings of about 16.5 and 19 cm. A concert mridangam is tuned to the performer's tonic, and one research dataset records instruments at six tonics from B to E.

Sources name two principal schools of mridangam playing: Thanjavur and Pudukkottai. The Thanjavur style grew under the Maratha kings of Thanjavur and values restraint and close attention to sruti over display. The Pudukkottai school traces to Manpoondia Pillai, a thavil player, and is known for technique and complex rhythmic patterning shaped by thavil practice.