About Web Harmonium

Web Harmonium is a free Indian harmonium you can play in a browser, plus a growing reference of song notation in sargam. No account, no download, no app store. It runs at web-harmonium.app and it is built and maintained by one person.

Why the notation here is checked before it is published

Harmonium notation on the web disagrees with itself constantly. The same aarti will appear on four sites in four different shapes, and a learner has no way to tell which one is the tune their family actually sings. Publishing a wrong note in a song everyone knows is worse than publishing nothing.

So every melody on this site goes through the same check before it ships. At least two, and usually three to seven, independently published notations are collected, parsed, and compared — as intervals, not as symbols. That distinction matters: different authors put Sa in different keys, so comparing the printed letters invents disagreements that are not really there. One of our sources for both national songs writes the entire piece in a different key with flat markings on nearly every note, and it matches the others exactly once the symbols are converted to intervals.

A melody is published only where the sources agree. Where they genuinely differ, the page says so rather than quietly picking one — the Jana Gana Mana page names the one note where four sources print a natural Ma and three print a sharpened one, and tells you that if you learned it the other way, you did not learn it wrong. Lines that no two sources agree on are left off the page entirely.

What is deliberately not here

Melodies still in copyright — film songs in particular — are not transcribed on this site, however often they are requested. The songs published here are traditional or long in the public domain: Om Jai Jagdish Hare (written in the 1870s), Jana Gana Mana (1911), Vande Mataram (1882), and traditional aartis with no single identifiable composer.

The sound

The instrument uses real harmonium recordings, not synthesis. The samples are CC0 (public domain) recordings from the Yale Euterpea Studio, published on Freesound and distributed via tonejs-instruments. Playback is Web Audio through Tone.js. A USB or Bluetooth MIDI keyboard can drive it directly, with velocity sensitivity, and it installs as a PWA from the browser's "Add to Home Screen".

How it pays for itself

The site is free and has no subscription, no paywall, and no affiliate links. Nothing on it is a sponsored placement, and no one pays to have a song added or a notation changed.

Your data

Playing the harmonium sends nothing anywhere — it all happens in your browser. Recordings are saved to the cloud only if you choose to, which requires signing in with Google, and those are deleted automatically after 15 days. Full detail is in the privacy policy.

Corrections

If a notation on this site does not match the version you sing, that is worth an email — especially if you can point to a published source. Several pages already exist in their current form because a printed notation contradicted the one we had. Write to the contact page.