Shazam for raagas

Name the raaga.
Learn to hear it.

Play it a few seconds of Carnatic music: it names the raaga, and shows you how to recognise it yourself.

free · open source · no sign-up

Works best with a tanpura or shruti-box drone under the melody, which a live concert always has. The tonic (Sa) is found from it.

Tap “Identify a raaga” to begin

How it works

01
Listen

Record, or point your phone at the stage

About 15–30 seconds of melody is enough. At a concert, just let it hear the singer over the drone.

02
Find Sa

It locks onto the tonic

The tanpura drone fixes the tonic (Sa). Every note is then heard relative to it, the way a listener does.

03
Name it

The raaga, with the runners-up

The top three raagas with honest confidence, the Sa it heard, and a plain-language note on how to hear that raaga.

An open public good

twelveswaras is non-commercial and open source, never a product, owned by no company. It pairs a raaga-recognition model with a community-built, openly-licensed data commons, so it keeps getting better.

The twelve swaras are the twelve note-positions of the octave, the shared alphabet of Carnatic and Hindustani music. Carnatic is where we start; the name, schema and pipeline are tradition-neutral by design, with Hindustani planned as a fast-follow.

40 raagas code · MIT data · CC-BY-4.0 Carnatic first no login

Questions

Does it work at a live concert?

Yes, a concert has a tanpura drone, which is exactly what it needs to find the tonic. Point your phone at the stage for about 30 seconds. Solo singing with no drone is unreliable.

Is it really free, with no account?

Yes. Non-commercial, MIT-licensed code, a CC-BY-4.0 data commons, and no sign-up. It is a public good, not a product.

Which raagas does it know?

40 Carnatic raagas in this version, a mix of the common melakarta and janya raagas you hear in concerts. Hindustani is planned.

Do I need to install anything?

No, it runs in your browser. On a phone, use “Add to Home Screen” for a full-screen, app-like experience.