Build a 6–8 page research guide that maps five or six Carnatic tāḷa structures onto Western meter, with notation, audio demos, and a student worksheet.
Our students at Geetanjali School of Music arrive with real rhythmic training. They know tāḷa, jāti, gati and nadai. Many of them then sit for AP Music Theory and have to learn beats, measures, time signatures, simple and compound meters, subdivisions, and Western rhythmic notation as if from scratch. We want to stop teaching it that way.
We're commissioning a research guide that uses what a Carnatic student already knows as the on-ramp to Western rhythmic vocabulary. Pick five or six familiar tāḷa structures — Ādi, Rūpaka, Miśra Chāpu, Khaṇḍa Chāpu, and a couple of your choice. For each one, notate a short rhythmic example in Carnatic form and in Western staff notation. Then say what the translation captures cleanly and what it flattens or distorts. A tāḷa is not just a time signature. Show where the two systems agree, and where they're actually describing different things.
Deliverables:
- A 6–8 page visual research guide, written for a Carnatic-trained student preparing for AP Music Theory.
- Western notation of at least 5 Carnatic rhythmic examples.
- Carnatic notation / tāḷa representation of the same examples, side by side.
- A comparison chart of Western meter vs Carnatic tāḷa (what each system encodes, and how).
- 3–5 short recorded demonstrations (you clapping, counting, or performing the examples).
- A one-page student worksheet with an answer key.
We'll share our internal AP Music Theory prep notes, sample tāḷa exercises we already use in class, and the College Board AP Music Theory course page (apcentral.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-music-theory) as your outside reference. Final work is due by 13 September 2026 and, if it lands well, we'll use it with our students next cycle.