By Monica Singhal Kumar, Director, Bloombuds ASD Life Trust
In our homes we turn to a bhajan when the room feels heavy, to a vilambit when the evening asks for stillness, to a brighter bandish when the day needs a lift. That instinct is not superstition. It is science meeting samskara. A review by Anitha K and Dr Parameshachari B D at GSSSIETW Mysuru explores how Indian classical ragas can support mind and body, and how we can move from vague belief to measurable practice. Their paper in the International Journal of Engineering Research and Development pulls together evidence, methods and a simple message for practitioners and parents alike listen to the music and the body together, then measure what changes.
The review highlights a basic but often ignored truth about tempo and physiology. Music near the resting heart rate around seventy to seventy five beats per minute tends to soothe, while significantly faster rhythms energize and very slow patterns can induce uncertainty before settling the listener. This sits well with the classical time theory of ragas, which ties certain melodic frameworks to parts of the day to evoke specific moods and states. Anyone who has felt the calm creep in with an unhurried alap knows this in their bones. The paper gathers such insights and places them in a framework that clinicians and educators can test in the real world.
Here is where the authors take a clear stand. It is not enough to say use music for healing. The hard questions matter which raga for which need, how long to play it, and when in the day it works best. The review proposes a path to answers by combining digital signal processing that captures the swara movements and features of a raga with machine learning models that can recognize and classify ragas reliably. In other words, first know exactly what you are playing, then track outcomes with rigor. The paper reports accuracy percentages across algorithms from existing studies to show that raga recognition is feasible, which clears a major hurdle for structured therapy protocols.
As a parent and practitioner working with neurodivergent children, I have little patience for airy promises. I want a playlist that can steady breath, soften sensory edges, and bring a room back from overload. The IJERD review gives us guardrails. Start with tempos aligned to calm, respect the time of day associations built into the tradition, and pair listening sessions with simple measures of mood, focus, and sleep. Keep it gentle and consistent. Let the child lead. If a phrase irritates, change it. If a tanpura drone soothes, give it space. Over weeks, patterns emerge and care becomes more precise, not because a miracle occurred but because we observed with care and adjusted with love.
The technology in the paper is not a distraction. It is our ally. Feature extraction helps us represent the nuances that make a raga itself rather than a generic scale. Classification ensures that a therapy session meant to be Darbari does not drift into a different tonal world by accident. With these tools in place, hospitals, schools and therapy centers can build libraries that are tagged accurately and playlists that are intentional. We can then tie outcomes to specific musical choices instead of treating music as a blur. Evidence grows only when selection and measurement stay tight and honest.
This is my stance. India should invest in clinically guided, culturally rooted raga therapy as an adjunct to care in schools and clinics. Not as a replacement for medicine, but as a companion that often reaches where words do not. The review by Anitha K and Dr Parameshachari B D makes the work concrete and testable. It names the gaps in dosages and timing, then shows how signal processing and machine learning can close those gaps by making selection and replication reliable. That is the bridge from faith to practice, from good taste to good science.
There is one more layer. Tradition asks us to honor timing. Science asks us to report results. When we bring them together, a morning raga can become a daily breathwork for an anxious teenager, an evening composition can lower the temperature of a restless home, and a short session before therapy can help a child arrive in their body. Small moves, large relief. We do not need to wait for a perfect grand theory to begin. We need to begin visibly, document carefully, and share what works so others can build on it. The literature that this IJERD paper surveys has already laid the groundwork by mapping features, testing classifiers, and organizing knowledge in one place for the next wave of practical trials.
If you care about mind and body in equal measure, this is your invitation. Bring your tanpura and your timer. Bring your curiosity and your notebook. Play with intention, measure with humility, and let the child or patient tell you what the numbers cannot. When art and attention pull in the same direction, the nervous system often follows. And when the nervous system softens, life opens a little. That is medicine too.