How it works

Choose a rhythm from the library, build one from a tala and a nadai, or read your word from Encode in time. See it in the grid, a row of cells to each beat. Play it, loop it, slow it right down, and hear its modes.

The grid, the syllables and the sound come from the same steps, so what is lit is always what is playing.

The words

Solkattu is the syllable language; konnakol is the performance art of reciting it; jathi is the structured form used in South Indian classical dance. Musicians often use the three interchangeably.

The words themselves, Taka, Takita, Taka Dimi, Da Di Gi Na Dum, come from the lesson sheet, including its rule that a second four becomes Taka Juna.

The cycle and the flow

A tala is the cycle, the metre that keeps turning. The nadai is how each beat of it is divided. Only the talas and nadai the sources name are offered. None have been invented to fill a gap.

Where two sources divide a beat differently, both readings are offered and labelled rather than merged. A dash is a division you feel but do not count.

Where each rhythm comes from

Every rhythm in the library carries one label. Quoted: written out by the sources, in full. Derived: a grouping the lesson sheet does not write out, spelled by the method it gives. PHYTHAGRAM: composed here, using the sources’ words but not traditional and never presented as such. Beats divided differently, phrases crossing the beat, rotations.

The sources contain no korvai, so the library offers none.

Modes of rhythm

A rhythm is a cycle. Just as a scale has a mode beginning on each of its notes, a rhythm has a mode beginning on each of its notes: the same syllables, durations and groupings, in the same circular order, with a different note treated as beat one. Mode 1 is the rhythm as written.

So 3+2 is a mode of 2+3, and 4+3 a mode of 3+4. Both pairs are already in the lesson sheet. A mode begins on a note, never on a felt division, and never where the tala’s beats would stop lining up. A rhythm that repeats inside itself has fewer modes than notes: Takita three times over has three.

This is not displacement, which slides a rhythm against the beat. Reading rhythms through their modes is PHYTHAGRAM’s application here, not a claim about traditional konnakol, and it is not attributed to any named educator.

Tempo and practice

Tempo is beats per minute: the tala’s beat, not the cell. At 60 a beat lasts one second whatever the nadai, so seven cells simply fill that second faster. 60 is a starting point chosen for learning, not a tempo any source prescribes.

A practice session is a PHYTHAGRAM exercise that takes the help away one step at a time: follow, recite, respond, then keep the subdivision going without the grid. The idea comes from the rhythm4inclusion curriculum’s finger-counting and silent articulation. It counts cycles. It cannot hear you, so it never judges how well you did.