Ensembling: Veena MiniVersion or Indian chordophones oh my!

Hello! It’s been a while! Well but good things come to those who wait..

Today we have exciting news about the long awaited Veena mini version!!

(Do you remember the Veenas? We started work on this a whopping 7! years ago, waay back in 2018, when we had Google Code-In students helping us, especially the finalist antara which did a lot of research for us on veena tickets!
As such we did actually resolve several of these already in 2019 and 2020, but it was hard, then stuff happened. Covid happened, genders happened, new computer, the the-whole-world-is-now-a-parody-of-itself timeline happened, lol šŸ˜­)

If you remember from way back in 2020 we also added a Indonesian rebab separate from the rebab we already had – this is because that, similar to the Veena, the Rebab is one heck of a complicated matter! (so complicated, in fact, that it and its brethren have gotten their own mini-version!). We’ll get to this one later.

Now things are as chaotic as ever, but after our summit in India last year, I decided there is no better time to finish up the remaining tickets in this version.

Preface:

“Veena” is actually a collective term for any kind of Indian chordophone (string instrument) spanning several millennia, from the oldest harp-like ones (yazh) to the later box-zithers (rudra-veena) and big calabash lutes (Saraswati-veena) to finally the modern lutes and hybrids (sitar, hansa-veena).
Additionally there are some other Indian instruments that are not actually “Veena” as such, which got added with this version anyway, as researching the various Veenas brought up information about them. This also lead to an overlap with the plucked and bowed world of R*b*b (that’s rabab, rubab, rebab, rabob, rhubab and similar), but those will be their own mini-version as mentioned before, because it’s one hell of an information-iceberg, and that way lies madness sarinda and esraj.

This has been the most extensively researched ensembling mini-version yet!
So, without further ado, here is the long overdue, Veena ensembling!

Mini Version

First let’s cover a few tickets updating or improving already existing things:

Sub-Improvement

  • [INST-244] – Improve vichitra veena
  • [INST-674] – Improve Saraswati veena
  • [INST-679] – Improve rudra veena
  • [INST-680] – Improve chitra veena
  • [INST-687] – Improve Sursingar
  • [INST-913] – Improve the Electric Sitar
  • [INST-977] – Improve ektara/gopichan
  • [INST-978] – Improve tumbi aka ektar
  • [INST-980] – Improve ravanahatha
  • [INST-681] – Saradiya veena alias for Sarod
  • [INST-683] – Add shatatantri vina/veena aliases to santoor
  • [INST-685] – Add “saptatantri veena”/”saptatantri vina” alias to sitar

Then let’s look at a string of tickets that were closed because they where deemed too novelty or lacking enough information:

..and, due to the time it all took šŸ˜… here are a couple that were then reopened again because by now new information was added!

Here are some sarod-related things (and here is where we get dangerously close to the “lute” r*babs, oh no.)

Sub-New Feature

..and the the final bits, old yazh (or yazhoo?) which is kind of an ancient veena (which leads into taus/mayuri) and khamak/gubguba/anandalahari which has some similarities with gopichan/tuntuna bringing us nicely around to the beginning again (puh!)

Instrument Images

In the time since we started this mini-version, many changes have come to the MusicBrainz database! We are well on our way though the React conversion and we also have a new Instrument Image provider!

So. as you may remember we were sued by a copyright troll many years ago; it didn’t even go to court but was dropped outright! However the aftermath of that is that we no longer could use Wikimedia Commons images.

Enter IROM! During my instrument research I noticed these very nice illustrations of instruments, and several sites made by IROM, a Japanese instrument fan! These seemed to be free-use, but to make extra sure we, with help from mb user Nyanko-sensei aka D4RK-PH0ENiX translated and sent a letter to ask. The upshoot is that these are images we can use! (we also talked about that in this blogpost).

Since then we have added lots of instrument images to our repository of organized IROM images to use in MusicBrainz, and you should expect even more in the future!

Now I’m a bit tired of chordophones, so despite digging into both ravanahatta and other fiddles/lutes, we are going to have a little break and work on an easier mini version next …. [chitarra batente!]

For those curious, a good article explaining the differences between gopichan, thumbi and tuntuna:

Ektara: a family of one-stringed musical instruments from India

Author: ApeKattQuest, MonkeyPython

Ararararaa! I like music, Lupin III, lego, colouring, and daaataabaseees (and Instruments)..

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