I used to work in the video game industry (for about 8 years as an engineer, though briefly as a musician prior to that), but now I work in movies, mainly dealing in graphics/rendering technology and research. My actual role makes me something of a blend between R&D and direct technology development/support for the films themselves.

Although the end product is technically animated films (at Dreamworks), my day to day work makes me more of a pure mathematician dealing with solving problems in the realm of computational/analytic geometry, statistical analysis, Fourier analysis, Monte Carlo simulations of light scattering behaviors, and so on.  The research I mentioned that I'm working on is basically solving the problem of how to perform importance sampling of the probability distribution functions of light scattering behaviors in volumes of microstructure geometries such as hair and feathers -- interesting discovery is that when it comes to behaviors of light per strand, there is very little difference between human hair and colored fiberglass.  Prior to this point, everybody had been doing it brute force with an exhaustive Monte Carlo approach, but this work makes it ~4x more efficient.

ftufc said
Welcome Parashar!  What an interesting background.  My only exposure to the work you do is my prior casual interest in fractals.  The integration of math into natural aspects of life [music included] just blow me away.

And you've actually answered a question I've long had regarding certain Eastern music; without knowing anything about Carnatic music, only hearing it, you can pretty easily intuit that the notes that make up that music aren't the traditional notes/pitches that Western music uses but I just couldn't get my head around the difference; you explained it very clearly.

Curiously enough, at the time I was attending (my school was UIUC), they had a really screwed up fine arts college that had some weird legacy rules that required things like lengthy portfolio reviews and recommendation processes prior to entry into any given fine arts program.  As such they made certain programs like music, very difficult and tedious to get into for people already in other majors...  unless they were grad students in other majors, in which case, the rules didn't apply to them.  Anyway, they tried to alleviate this with "outsider" programs like the one I enrolled in -- so technically, my second major was a music theory major, but it was not through the fine arts college...  it was for a Bachelor of Science in Music Theory.

The rules have since changed, and such programs are no longer needed, but it's still amusing to think of it in retrospect.

In regards to the other matter, yeah, it's part of the thing that makes for the characteristically "Indian" sound.  There is the difference between equal temperament and just temperament, but that's actually a minor factor.  Just yesterday, I experimented with playing a few common ragas in equal temperament, and they still retained their basic character (what we call "bhaavam").  It might get a little hairy with a few specific ragas where we play things just a little off due to historical reasons and how they've colored people's perceptions of that basic character.

To give you an example.  I can take a raga like Sankarabharanam, which you can probably try yourself -- the raw pitches are equivalent to that of a Major scale.  But since you generally don't play the raw pitches, just playing tunes in a major scale doesn't really give you Sankarabharanam.  You'll play a second, for instance, by sliding from the tonic to the third, and then oscillating back and forth between the third and the second -- though that only applies when you're ascending in pitch to reach the second.  When descending, you just plain glissando.  You do the same thing with the fourth and the sixth where you slide from the note one down to the one above and oscillate back to and fro the note you actually want to play.  Playing the third when ascending is much the same, except without the continuing oscillation.

Of course, that's just a baseline definition, and the demands of aesthetics means you drift from these rules, often based on how quickly you're moving across different pitches or if you're repeating pitches and so on.  Beyond a certain speed, for instance, oscillations just become regular trills, and then there's no point in being explicit.  There are also stylistic variations -- sometimes people will forego the oscillation between the fifth and the fourth for an entire verse just in order to stress the 2nd-3rd and 5th-6th relationship.

I've did a demonstration for my school way back where I applied the basic rules of Sankarabharanam to Twinkle Twinkle, and it makes for something radically different in spite of using the same notes.  Since there are leaps in pitch with Twinkle Twinkle, you generally include at least one such oscillation cycle on the first iteration of each note...  and when making leaps down down in pitch you'll have to start at least one interval up and slide down to the note on the first iteration.