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Explore / Instruments / Mridangam
Play it yourself

Mridangam

Strike the treble head's outer rings or its black spot, and the larger bass head, with one finger or two. Every pad plays a real stroke cut from one recording of one drum.

Tap the mridangam to look inside
A mridangam lying on its side: a barrel-shaped jackfruit-wood shell laced end to end with sixteen runs of leather strap; the treble head faces us with its black spot, a pale ring of bare skin, a wider ring of calf hide and a braided leather hoop that the straps wrap over; the larger bass head is at the far end.
Treble head (valanthalai)
Outer rings: ringing Black spot: dry
Bass head (thoppi)
Bass head: low

Tap a pad to strike it. Each pad plays a real stroke from one take, as recorded; nothing is pitch-shifted.

Your strokes0 of 32 kept
rings
spot
bass
Strike the pads; each stroke lands here.
Plays your strokes with the same three recordings. Pauses longer than 2 s are shortened to 2 s.
The whole take, 46 sTap the strip to play from there
Close-up, 36.9 to 42.5 swhere each pad's stroke was cut
Bass head · 37.2 s Outer rings · 41.5 s Black spot · 41.9 s

Times are in the take as uploaded. The three pad sounds are cut from exactly these places; when the playhead crosses a cut, its zone lights on the pad.

Nothing played yetThree strokes, one drum, one take

Every pad plays a stroke cut from ajaysm's "Mridangam-Tishra", one drum in one take. Nothing is pitch-shifted or synthesized.

As recorded: not pitch-shifted, not slowed, not synthesized.

Try these

  1. Strike the outer rings, then the spot: one rings on, one stops short. Both are real strokes from the same drum, cut half a second apart.
  2. Strike the bass and the outer rings together, with two fingers.
  3. Tap Play along. The uploader calls the take "Tishra nade (Triple meter)", and its strokes come in groups of three. Try three strokes to each group, saying 'Tha Ki Ta', the syllables for three to a beat.Sources: Wikipedia, Konnakol

We found no openly licensed recording of gumki, the bass sound Umayalpuram K. Sivaraman likens to the cooing of a dove, so it is not here. Sources: Kumar 2023 (Musical Excellence review) · mridangams.com, tuning

Both heads turned to face you, in the same order as the drum above. Where each stroke is played is approximate; no source gives exact contact areas.

Keep the tala

Mridangam: keep the tala

Adi tala, the most common Carnatic rhythm cycle, has 8 beats, 4 + 2 + 2, kept with the hand. Keep it along with a real recording of mridangam strokes, played while their rhythm syllables are said aloud.

12345678Palm downLittle fingerRing fingerMiddle fingerPalmBack of the handPalmBack of the hand422 While the recording plays, each tap is checked against the player's beat. While it is stopped, each tap steps to the next beat and shows its hand gesture.

The beat marks are measured from the recording. We count beat 1 from the first stroke; the recording does not mark it, but the cycle then repeats about every 5.8 s, which fits. Gestures: Darbar, Carnatic rhythms 101 · Wikipedia, Tala

Beat1of 8
Palm down Play the recording and tap along, or tap the pad to step through the beats.
12345678

Nothing playing yetKonnakol with mridangam, by ajaysm

Questions about the mridangam

What is the black spot on a mridangam?

It is the soru (also called saadham or karanai), a paste of very fine iron-oxide powder and cooked rice built up layer by layer on the treble head and rubbed hard with a stone. Its weight, heaviest at the centre, makes the head ring with overtones in tune with each other. In 1920 C. V. Raman and Sivakali Kumar reported that this kind of loaded drumhead gives harmonic overtones, which most drums lack.

Sources: mridangams.com, parts · Kumar 2023 (Musical Excellence review) · Raman 1934 · Raman and Kumar 1920 · Wikipedia, Mridangam

Why does a mridangam sound like it has a note?

A plain drumhead vibrates in ways whose pitches do not line up, so most drums give more of a thud than a note. Raman found that the mridangam's loaded treble head groups its first nine ways of vibrating into five tones in a harmonic series, like a string. The treble head is tuned to the lead performer's 'Sa', so the drum sounds in key with the music.

Sources: Raman 1934 · Raman and Kumar 1920 · Kumar 2023 (Musical Excellence review) · IIT Madras page

Why do mridangam players put dough on the drum?

Just before playing, the player wets the larger bass head and presses a coin-sized lump of semolina (rava) and water onto its centre. It lowers the pitch and gives a deep, ringing bass, and it can be taken off after the session. Too much of it makes some bass sounds impossible, and some players now use rubber gum instead.

Sources: Wikipedia, Mridangam · mridangams.com, tuning · Kumar 2023 (Musical Excellence review)

How is a mridangam tuned?

The player holds a small wooden stick against the hoop at the edge of the treble head and taps it with a stone: from above to raise the pitch, from below to lower it. This is repeated all the way round until the head sounds the same everywhere, checked against a pitch pipe or a tanpura (tambura).

Sources: mridangams.com, tuning · Wikipedia, Mridangam · PARI, mridangam makers · Murphy 1965

What is the difference between a mridangam and a tabla?

The tabla, a pair of separate drums, is often called the mridangam's counterpart in Hindustani (North Indian) music. The mridangam, the main drum of Carnatic (South Indian) music, has both heads on one wooden shell, so its two heads are more closely coupled. Raman noted that mridangam players use the flat of the hand more often, while tabla players mostly use the fingertips.

Sources: Anantapadmanabhan, Bellur and Murthy 2013 · Kumar 2023 (Musical Excellence review) · mridangams.com, parts · Raman 1934 · Darbar, Mridangam · Wikipedia, Mridangam

What wood is a mridangam made of?

Usually jackfruit wood, hollowed from a single block about an inch thick. Makers say the wood's fibres and small pores keep the pitch steady as the weather changes, and a lab study in the Musical Excellence of Mridangam project found it the best choice of the woods it tested. Rosewood and other woods are also used.

Sources: Wikipedia, Mridangam · PARI, mridangam makers · mridangams.com, parts · Kumar 2023 (Musical Excellence review) · IIT Madras page · Murphy 1965

Sources
  1. Wikipedia, "Mridangam"
  2. Sriram Venkataraman, "Parts and Dimensions of Mridangam," mridangams.com
  3. Ashna Butani (2019), "The mridangam makers of Mylapore," People's Archive of Rural India
  4. "Parts of Mridhangam," personal page at ed.iitm.ac.in/~raman (IIT Madras)
  5. Arvind Shankar Kumar (2023), "Musical Excellence of Mridangam: an introductory review" (of the treatise by Umayalpuram K. Sivaraman, T. Ramasami and M. D. Naresh), arXiv:2307.09425
  6. C. V. Raman (1934), "The Indian musical drums," Proceedings of the Indian Academy of Sciences A 1:179-188
  7. C. V. Raman and Sivakali Kumar (1920), "Musical drums with harmonic overtones," Nature 104:500
  8. Dennis Murphy (1965), "The Structure, Repair and Acoustical Properties of the Classical Drums of India, with Specific Reference to Mrdanga and Tabla," Journal of the Music Academy Madras 36:223-247
  9. Sriram Venkataraman, "Mridangam Tuning and applying Special Paste," mridangams.com
  10. Sriram Venkataraman, "Mridangam Shape, Size, Measurement and Pitch," mridangams.com
  11. A. Anantapadmanabhan, A. Bellur and H. A. Murthy (2013), "Modal analysis and transcription of strokes of the mridangam using non-negative matrix factorization," IEEE ICASSP
  12. B. S. Ramakrishna and M. M. Sondhi (1954), "Vibrations of Indian musical drums regarded as composite membranes," JASA 26:523-529
  13. Darbar, "Mridangam"
  14. Duke University Musical Instrument Collections, "Mridangam"
  15. Wikipedia, "Konnakol"

Measurements of the recordings (pitch, overtones, fade times) are our own, made from the files on this page; method in recordings.json.

Recording: "Mridangam-Tishra" by ajaysm, Freesound, CC0 1.0. The three pad sounds are strokes cut from it at 37.2, 41.5 and 41.9 s, and Play along plays the whole take. Trimmed, faded, level-matched (loudest accents peak-limited) and converted to mono MP3. The uploader describes it as "Amateur playing".

Recording: "Mridangam" by V. Raghuraman, Internet Archive, public domain. One stroke excerpted, faded, level-matched and converted to mono MP3 (How the sound is made, step 2).

Recording: "Mridangam Jati" by ajaysm, Freesound, CC0 1.0. One stroke excerpted, faded, level-matched and converted to mono MP3 (How the sound is made, step 3).

Nothing on this page is pitch-shifted or synthesized, and the files are level-matched to each other. The tala's Slower switch plays a slowed copy. When two strokes sound together, two cuts from the same take start together in your browser.

Drawing modelled on photos: Wiki-mridangam (Domtw, CC BY-SA 3.0), A Miruthangam and A depiction of Miruthangam, A play of Miruthangam 1 and A depiction of Miruthangam play (Thamizhpparithi Maari, CC BY-SA 3.0), Music instrument gs (Gausanchennai, CC BY-SA 4.0), Mridangam transparent (Ranveig, public domain), T S Nandakumar, Mridangam (StevenNat, CC BY-SA 4.0); and on C. V. Raman's 1934 photographs for the ring proportions. The drum was modelled in inches and drawn from scratch; no photo is embedded or traced. The face-on heads are the same drawing turned to face you.

Measurements of the recordings (pitch, overtones, fade times, beat times) are our own, made from the files on this page; method in recordings.json. The 33 beat marks on the wheel were measured for this page from the onsets of the konnakol recording.

Recording: "Konnakol with Mridangam" by ajaysm, Freesound, CC0 1.0. Trimmed, faded, level-matched (loudest accents peak-limited) and converted to mono MP3. Slower plays a copy we slowed to three-quarter speed with its pitch kept (Rubber Band, in ffmpeg), level-matched and peak-limited.

Inside the mridangam

Tap a part

Tap the drawing or a card to choose a part.
How the sound is made

From the hand to the shell

The whole drum, and on the right its bass face seen from the end. The parts for the chosen step are lit.

lifts off: rings stays: stops

Both cut from one recording of one drum, half a second apart. The uploader does not name them, so we do not.

plaindrumheadmridangam 12345

Numbers are multiples of the lowest pitch, after Raman (1934). The sketch illustrates his numbers; it is not a measurement of these recordings.

damps high overtones lowers the pitch

From a different recording, ajaysm's "Mridangam Jati", on a drum the uploader says is tuned to C#. The pads' drum sounds a G (measured).

one shell, two heads

Sketches are illustrations, not to scale.

Hear it live

Upcoming mridangam concerts

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