The Rhythms in Mantra Pushpam

Abstract

The Mantra Pushpam, literally means the flowers of a sacred chant, which is recited at the very end of all the praying rituals in the temples, in the Hindu religion. This work questions why it is chanted at the end. What is the essence of it. Here we try to extract few features of these chants mathematically and statistically through the well-known techniques of non – linear time series analysis. We then convert the audio waves into digits and perform both linear and nonlinear analysis of those vectors or array of numbers, normalized, which while chanting can be taken as a time series. We make an assumption that the chanting has some rhythms whose features can be studied and come to a conclusion mathematically, which till now has not been done on any of the Hindu sacred chants. Hence this is a novel approach to such a study.