The anthropologist Alan Merriam has proposed a valuable model for ethnomusicology that divides the subject of music into three compartments: concepts, behaviors, and sounds—what we think, do, and hear (Merriam 1964). In the case of early Indian music, most of our information is in the form of concepts. For the actual behaviors and sounds of music in ancient and medieval India, we have two sources of evidence: surviving verbal descriptions and our experience of Indian music today.
The English word...