A Rabindrasangeet session at Santiniketan: A click away?

No harmonium, tabla, tanpura, piano or strings. No fixed schedule for lessons. No pressure to “catch up with the class”, either. Learning, practising or even performing Rabindrasangeet is now possible at any time from anywhere in the world, through a mouse-click.

Anandadhara.com, a “unique combination of software and service”, has brought lessons for Tagore songs online “for the first time”. The website aspires to be a community on the Internet for all lovers of Rabindrasangeet. On the one hand, it functions as a virtual institution for those who want to learn Tagore songs, on the other, it encourages those who enjoy singing, but do not prefer the ambit of formal training.

“I have always thought of applying multimedia into music, and the constraint of time in today’s lifestyle gave birth to this concept. The system is interactive, user-friendly and based on the techniques of distance learning through the Net. Unlike in a brick-and-mortar situation, you can learn at your own pace and evaluation is not mandatory,” explains Abhijit Patronobis of AKA Systems, whose brainchild anandadhara.com is. The self-taught Patronobis has developed the novel software after a year of trial and error, supported by Kaustav Ghosh and Avi Basu.

One can either learn on his/her own or interact with the ‘guru’ from the desktop. The courses and modules (lessons) are prepared under the direction of late Subinoy Roy and Ritu Guha, while the current faculty comprises Pramita Mallick, Avirup Guhathakurta and Suranjan Roy. The portal offers three levels/courses – basics (for beginners), intermediate and advanced.

While basics and intermediate are functional, the Advanced course will be introduced shortly. Each level tackles 50 songs, starting from the rudiments and gradually approaching a complex form of the music, essence of the song and rhythm.

“The syllabus follows a structured pattern, but we also consider requests from learners and try to accommodate the most popular requests in our syllabi,” says Patronobis, founder-member, keyboard player and frontman of the erstwhile Crosswinds (now Krosswindz).

Once a learner registers (for free) at anandadhara.com, he/she creates a unique ID and downloads a demo software or module to understand how the process works.

The module is an interactive multimedia tool that contains all the elements in a song a student needs to learn. These include lyrics (in both English and Bengali), notation (with Western staff notation), information, translation, summary, glossary, audio samples for pronunciation and also an accompaniment minus-one track.

The controls of the module enable the learner to listen to the song and practise line by line or in fragments, any number of times. The module also keeps count of the beat and scrolls through the lyrics and notations to guide the learner through the song and music so that he/she is never lost. After learning the song, the student can record his/her voice, convert it to an MP3 format through a third-party software and e-mail it to the teachers as an attachment. The teachers evaluate the voice bytes and demonstrate (by singing and explanations) the parts that need to be corrected. Live interaction on the Net is also on the cards.

“We already have 68 students, mostly non-resident Bengalis, and are recording around 150 hits per day,” declares Patronobis, who plans a ceremonial launch of his portal in May. Buoyed by the response, he is planning to carry forward the online lessons to other genres of “serious music” too.