Swara

Svara, also spelled swara, is a Sanskrit word that connotes a note in the successive steps of the octave. More comprehensively, it is the ancient Indian concept about the complete dimension of musical pitch.

The svara differs from sruti concept in Indian music. A sruti is the smallest gradation of pitch that human ear can detect and a singer or instrument can produce. A svara is the selected pitches from which the musician constructs the scales, melodies and ragas. The ancient Sanskrit text Natya Shastra identifies and discusses twenty two sruti and seven svara. The svara studies in ancient Sanskrit texts include the musical gamut and its tuning, categories of melodic models and the raga compositions.

The seven notes of the musical scale in Indian classical music are shadja (षड्ज), rishabh (ऋषभ), gandhar (गान्धार), madhyam (मध्यम), pancham (पञ्चम), dhaivat (धैवत) and nishad (निषाद). These seven svara are shortened to Sa, Ri (Carnatic) or Re (Hindustani), Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha, and Ni. Collectively these notes are known as the sargam (the word is an acronym of the consonants of the first four svaras). Sargam is the Indian equivalent to solfege, a technique for the teaching of sight-singing. The tone Sa is, as in Western moveable-Do solfège, the tonic of a piece or scale.

The word svara (Sanskrit: स्वर) is derived from the root svr which means "to sound".

The word is found in the Vedic literature, particularly the Samaveda, where it means accent and tone, or a musical note, depending on the context. The discussion there focusses on three accent pitch or levels: svarita (sounded, circumflex normal), udatta (high, raised) and anudatta (low, not raised). However, scholars question whether the singing of hymns and chants were always limited to three during the Vedic era. The word also appears in other texts. For example, it appears in Jaiminiya Upanishad Brahmana section 111.33, where the cyclic rise and setting of sun and world, is referred to as "the music of spheres", and the sun is stated to be "humming the wheel of the world". According to Ananda Coomaraswamy, the roots "svar, meaning "to shine" (whence surya or sun), and svr, meaning "to sound or resound" (whence svara, “musical note”) and also in some contexts "to shine", are all related in the ancient Indian imagination.

...
Wikipedia