About CarnaticABC
Carnatic music should be readable, listenable, and alive.
CarnaticABC is building an interactive Carnatic music library where students, teachers, and musicians can read, hear, share, and create music in a Carnatic-native way.
Today, Carnatic learning lives across recordings, PDFs, class notes, screenshots, YouTube lessons, and messages passed between teachers and students. Those materials are useful, but they are usually static.
CarnaticABC exists so a song, lesson, or exercise can become something more alive: readable as notation, playable with movement, shareable as a link, and editable when the music grows.
An interactive library first
The front door is the Library: a place to browse Carnatic music, follow the notation, and hear how it moves. The editor matters, but the first moment should be simple: pick a song, read it, listen to it, and learn.
Built for the people who carry the music
Students
Follow songs by ear and eye with notation that can play back.
Teachers
Share beautiful playable lessons instead of static screenshots and notes.
Musicians
Write, preserve, and publish music in a format that stays readable.
Why Carnatic notation needs its own medium
Carnatic music is not just a sequence of isolated notes. A swara has context, direction, and motion. Gamakas are not decorations added after the fact; they are part of how the music is understood.
CarnaticABC starts from plain text because text is portable, teachable, and easy to share. From there, the app can show the musical movement and play it back, while still keeping the notation readable.
Where this is going
The long-term vision is a living, open, programmable medium for Carnatic music: a Library for discovery, Studio for creation, notation that stays readable, playback that respects movement, and future tools that can help teachers and musicians build on top of it.
- A public Library of playable Carnatic compositions
- Studio tools for creating, saving, and publishing music
- Plain-text notation built around swaras, ragas, and gamakas
- Future exports and assistants that understand Carnatic music
Pricing
CarnaticABC is in beta. Free is always available, Plus is free temporarily while Studio grows, and Pro pricing is still TBD.
The notation foundation and core learning experience are intended to stay free and open source. Paid plans are for hosted creator and teacher workflows that need more storage, sharing, publishing, and export tools.
Free
$0
- Browse the public Library
- Try the notation playground
- Open shared songs
- Use basic playback
Plus
Free during beta
- Everything in Free
- Save more Studio songs
- Publish and share songs
- Private or unlisted sharing
- Standard creator exports
Pro
TBD
- Everything in Plus
- Teacher collections
- Private lesson links
- Advanced export formats
- Larger shared libraries
- Future classroom tools