KARACHI (The Thursday Times) — The Saami family, keepers of one of South Asia’s oldest classical singing lineages, has won backing from the Mozilla Foundation for a project to record and study khayal with tools the family itself will own.
The project, “Infinite Raag”, is one of 20 in the first cohort of Artists Make Technology, an initiative anchored by Mozilla and the Doris Duke Foundation with the Hewlett and MacArthur foundations, and further support from the Ford Foundation and Omidyar Network. It is led by Rauf Saami of the Saami Brothers, working with Nermeen Saba Arastu, a law professor and his student, and Josh Kohn of the Center for Cultural Vibrancy, the Baltimore nonprofit named in the cohort.
How it will work: the project will record Ustad Naseeruddin Saami and his principal students, his sons Urooj and Rauf, during vocal sessions that run for hours. Audio, biometric sensors and a pitch tracker built for intervals finer than the Western 12-note scale will be synchronised to map what the project calls “moments of deep coherence and transcendence”, and to study how the singing affects the singers themselves. The AI tools will be “consent-based, nongenerative, artist-governed”: they analyse the music rather than produce imitations of it.
“AI training data often leaves out oral, embodied, spiritual, and lineage-based knowledge,” the project says. Rauf Saami said it “seeks to challenge extractive uses of AI and advance technology that supports cultural sovereignty, preservation, and exploration of transcendence.”
Ustad Naseeruddin Saami, born in 1946, is regarded as the only living practitioner of the surti scale, which divides the octave into 49 microtones. He began learning at the age of 10 from his uncle, and has passed the knowledge on to his sons the same way, by ear and in person. The family traces its line nearly 800 years to the circle of the poet Amir Khusrau, and he won an Aga Khan Music Award in 2025.
For a tradition that has survived only through oral teaching, the recordings could become the most detailed record yet of how it is sung, kept by the family that sings it.
