Why does Indian music (from India) seem to sound off-key?
I don’t mean to be disrespectful of western music, but the fact is, modern western music is the one that is really off-key. You’ll understand what I mean, if you listen to music in just-intonation. Try listening to a barbershop quartet. In order to be able to play in large groups and sound reasonably good, a compromise called equal-temperment was accepted as the basis of tuning western instruments. Indian music being mainly vocal with a very small ensemble playing in unison can afford to not make this compromise. Also the most important part of Indian music is, a steady background provided by an instrument called tambura, which only plays the tonic and the perfect fifth. Because of the way the tambura is built, it produces rich harmonics. The melody produced by a vocalist or instrumentalist has to be heard against this background to understand how the harmony in Indian music works. Scala is a powerful tool that can be used to experiment with various tuning systems.
