3. Material y Métodos
3.1. Ubicación del experimento
As the name implies, the main function of Sequence Construal is to check for the sequencing of notes.
(17) Sequence Construal (SC)
Checking for sequencing of notes
This function checks for grammaticality. Once again, like TC, the reason for the ungrammaticality of a sequence will be traced to an *AMB violation in the globally networked Carnatic music lexicon. The other two functions of SC which evaluate stylistic details will be taken up in the next chapter when I discuss constraints which belong to the stylistic set. Let us recall our earlier discussion of two types of scales in Carnatic Music in Rule 7 of (3), chapter 2, p. 20. I said that though we enumerate a scale as a sequence of notes, in principle, a scale is an unordered set of tones. Therefore in principle, for in-stance, though the scale of the raagam Kalyaaͣi is said to be ‘sa ri gu mi pa di nu Sa’, in principle, any note can precede or follow any other note as the scale is an unordered set of tones. However, in practice, not every logically possible combination is grammatical. The constraint on possible ordering is not imposed from within the grammar of a particular raagam but due to the high ranking constraint we have already referred to, namely *AMB. The particular constraint here is *AMBIGUITYSEQUENCE (*AMBSEQ for short). As I have already mentioned, the lexicons of raagas are networked and that *AMB is a global constraint looking for possible ambiguity to be starred as ungram-matical. Examine the musical demonstration in (18) below along with the explanations for the ungrammaticality of the starred sequences.
A shrewd reader would ask the question: “If raagas like Moohanam and Hamsadhvani have partially identical sequences in their scales, how will
*AMBSEQ work in the case of these raagas?” I answer the question in chapter 8 where I classify raagas into two sets, namely the Idiomatic set and the
154 Construing meaning: Determining Grammaticality
Scalar set and discuss how different strategies may be employed in these two sets of raagas to avoid ambiguity.
(18) Musical demonstration
Kalyaaͣi II [ 6.65]
a. ri mi gu b. sa pa mi gu ri c. gu nu di pa mi ri gu d. nu mi di nu pa e. *ri gu pa Moohanam, Hamsadhvani f. *sa ri mi pa Saraswati, Hamsanaadam
g. *sa gu Valaji, Amritavarshiͣi, Gambiira naaҲai etc.
In addition to *AMB deciding on the grammaticality of sequences of notes, as I have already mentioned earlier in chapter 2 (p. 20), there are certain scales called vakra raagas, which literally means ‘crooked scales’, which supposedly allow only a certain sequence of notes. Though in tra-ditional classication these scales have a xed non-linear progression of notes as illustrated below, in practice, it is taken to mean a strict prohibition on certain linear sequences. I illustrate this point below with the raagam Puurvikalyaaͣi.
(19) Musical demonstration
Puurvikalyaaͣi I [ 6.66]
a. Scale: sa ra gu mi pa di pa Sa Sa nu di pa mi gu ra sa
b. Practice: The sequence *di nu Sa is prohibited.
Permitted sequences: pa di nu di pa mi di Sa
mi nu di Sa nu di ...
gu mi di nu (Ri) nu di pa mi117
Thus SC assigns grammaticality judgments to sequences checking the inputs for any violations of specic prohibitions in the lexicon of a particular raa-gam and also evaluating the grammaticality of sequences with the help of the global constraint *AMBSEQ to see whether there is any loss of identity with another raagam anywhere in the network and if there is ambiguity, to mark it as ungrammatical.
First of all, it is important to see how sequences are construed for evalu-ation. Let me illustrate the point, though I may be running ahead of myself in doing so. I just now said that the sequence ‘ri gu pa’ is disallowed for the
Determining grammaticality: Sequence Construal 155 raagam Kalyaaͣi. However, listen to the musical demonstration below of a structured sequence of notes in Kalyaaͣi raagam.
(20) Musical demonstration
Kalyaaͣi III [ 6.67]
[’ri gu,] [pa mi ’gu, ri sa]
[’pa nu di,] [’pa mi gu,] [’ri mi gu,] [ ’ri sa nu]
[pa ’nu, di pa mi]...
*[’pa nu,][’Sa nu di,]...
*[pa ’nu, Sa]
Though ‘gu’ is followed by ‘pa’ in the sequence of notes, this musical line does not attract any *AMBSEQ violation. The reason for not attracting an
*AMBSEQ violation is that while ‘gu’ belongs to the rst musical phrase (en-closed in brackets), ‘pa’ belongs to another phrase (I will dene the con-cept ‘musical phrase’ (enclosed by square brackets) and prominence in musical phrases (marked by a closing apostrophe) in the next section) and the domain of *AMBSEQ is the musical phrase. Sequencing of notes across phrases, however, is not checked by *AMBSEQ and so the grammaticality of the line above (we will see in the next chapter that sequencing beyond the musical phrase is taken care of by stylistic constraints checking for musical coherence).
Once again like TC, SC also does not evaluate all sequence violations alike. Just as TC ranks certain violations of tonal rendering higher than oth-ers (we will see shortly what the criterion is), SC also tolerates violations of certain notes/sequences in a musical phrase.
Clearly, *AMBSEQ does not blindly go by linear sequencing of the notes
‘pa nu’, even within phrases, but checks the overall use of notes. In the gram-matical phrases, ambiguity is avoided by the use of the note ‘di’ within the musical phrase, though the note ‘pa’ is not followed by ‘di’. Thus we see that *AMBSEQ is constrained to check for sequences within musical phrases and, crucially, partly ambiguous sequencing is tolerated provided the phrase contains clearly unambiguous notes to mitigate the potential violation.118 In conclusion, normally the domain of the construal SC is the musical phrase.
In addition, even within musical phrases, SC does not blindly check for lin-ear sequencing of notes. If a note which is not allowed to be skipped (be-cause of *AMBSEQ violation) is found to be absent at position ‘n’, checking continues within the musical phrase to conrm the presence of the skipped note in the musical phrase before evaluating the musical phrase for an
156 Construing meaning: Determining Grammaticality
*AMBSEQ violation. In a sense, *AMBSEQ too may function as though notes in a phrase were unordered within the phrase and only absence signals a violation.
But this strategy of SC assuming that notes in a musical phrase are unor-dered will not work in the case of vakra raagas where what has to be scru-tinized is the presence of a precise sequence *‘n1n2n3’ which is banned. I assume that SC runs in two versions, namely SC (general) and SC (special).
In the former, SC evaluates musical phrases under the assumption that notes are not linearly ordered and the checking only looks out for missing notes which may render the phrase ungrammatical. In the special version which is triggered only by ‘vakra’ raagas, the general assumption that notes are unordered is set aside. However, even in vakra raagas, strict linear ordering is assumed only for specically targeted notes/sequences. For instance, in a raagam like Kaamboodi which disallows the linear sequences [di ni sa] and [gu ma pa di ni sa], checking for strictly linear sequencing within musical phrases is triggered by the presence of ‘ni’ in a musical phrase. Once the note sequence ‘di ni’ is located then the special version of SC goes into high alert making sure that it is never followed by ‘Sa’ immediately. Thus even the special version of SC does not have the impossible task of looking for unspeciable violations.
Thus SC (general) checks for the presence or absence of a note in a musi-cal phrase and then acts accordingly and SC (special) is triggered only for vakra raagas where specied notes require certain other specied notes not to follow this note which alone trigger a violation mark.
Let us get back to our earlier problem of two idiosyncratic raagas having partially overlapping lexical specications with the specifc example of the raagas Harikaamboodi and Kaamboodi and the specications for the note
‘ma’. Since both raagas allow RenScale as well as gentle pitch wave aug.ma we need to know how *AMBTONE/*AMBSEQ operates here.
(21) Musical demonstration119 Harikaamboodi
Gentle Pitch Wave ‘ma’
[’ri gu] [ ’ma pa] [’di, ni di] [’pa ma gu ma,]
Kaamboodi
[’ma, (di) pa ma gu] [‘ma pa di ni] [’pa di,]
The dominant raagam in this pair being Kaamboodi, and Harikaamboodi being a ‘poor relative’, the former sets the terms for the use of the gentle
Determining grammaticality: Phrasal Construal 157 pitch wave for aug.ma. The note in question, i.e. the gentle pitch wave aug.
ma is in italics in the notation above. Note that while in Harikaamboodi the note in question initiates a phrase or is phrase nal, in Kaamboodi it is phrase initial, long and prominent or phrase initial when the phrase in-cludes notes till ‘ni’. Finally, the gentle aug.ma pitchwave is allowed as a
nal pivot only for Harikaamboodi. Thus we see that there are subtle rules disambiguating raagas even when they select the same pitch values and these rules are encoded among the sequential constraints hence directly under
*AMBSEQ.