Besides the meter the mantrās also have three accents associated with their annunciation [36]. When a syllable is stressed it is called udātta, literally meaning acute or high. Then there is anudātta, which is neither high nor low, it is grave or middle. The latter is indicated in old vedic texts by a line below the syllable. The last is svarita, which is low. This is marked by a vertical line over the syllable in ancient vedas and brahmanās. These accents lead us to the musical notes – quoting Pānini, the 5^th century B.C. vedic scholar, S. Bandyopadhyaya says in his book “the Origin of Rāga” [37] that the rising note or sound is udātta ; anudātta is the accent coming down the scale following this rise and svarita is flat or the accent that is ‘not raised’.

This then leads us to the third part of the shlöka…

3. sāma samtānah – sāma ( saama ) literally means ‘uniformity’. It is also the name of the third veda that is considered the origin of Indian music. sama ( sama ) is the prefix denoting ‘sameness’ as in the word samsāra , which denotes the uniformity of the world around us. As a word, sama stands for the beginning and the ending note of the musical scale – and they are both the same because the notes follow a cyclical pattern from one scale into the other. samtānah therefore means the uniform rhythms which give rise to this musical scale…

As we see from the heavens, we have a khagölik view of the Earth. The seven ‘lights’ in the sky are the Sun, Moon and the five planets visible to the naked eye. This symmetry is reflected into dhvani or music. The primary seven notes are sa, re, ga, ma, pa, dha, ni [38] which are also termed svars or the shining ones, just like the vowels of the Sanskrit language. If we take the first four we get the name sargama or what we now call the musical scale in the Indian classical system. These seven ‘lights’ are also the basis for the names of the days of the week [39]. These seven svars are also accented – ga and ni are udātta ; re and dha are anudātta and sa, ma, pa are svarita. Thus when the mantrās are chanted it is these notes which are followed. This then is where language and music meet to give us the essence of both the terrestrial and the heavenly sound energies.