Carnatic Ear Training
Two free listening games for Carnatic practice, right in your browser — no app to install, no account. Both are played over a tanpura drone tuned to your own Sa.
Swara identification: "Which swara?"
A tone plays relative to your current Sa, drawn from your chosen raga's own swara set. Listen — as many times as you like — then tap the swara you think you heard. Get instant feedback, and optionally sing the swara back afterwards for a quick, real-time pitch check against the same detection Swarasense uses everywhere else in the app. This is the direct, structured way to practise identifying swaras by ear, one at a time, against a steady shruti.
Raga recognition: "Which raga?"
A short phrase plays — drawn straight from a raga's own arohana (ascending scale) and avarohana (descending scale) — and you pick which raga you think it is from a handful of named choices. It's a listening game for raga recognition: training your ear to tell ragas apart by their scale shape, not just their names.
Heads up: these are clean, ornament-free phrases, not the full gamaka-inflected phrasing a real performance would use. A raga's real character leans heavily on gamakas (the swara-to-swara ornaments) — those are coming in a future update, so treat this exercise as training on scale shape today, not the whole story of how a raga actually sounds.
Why train your ear like this
Reading a raga's arohana and avarohana on a page (see the Carnatic music glossary and the full raga catalogue) tells you what the notes are. Ear training is how you learn to actually recognise them — swara by swara, and raga by raga — the way you'd need to while singing or listening to a real performance.
Start ear training →