Swars and emotional response

Prior Reading 

1. The Holy Grail of Music

Question
Does the choice of swars (notes) affect the resultant emotion?

Answer
Answering this question directly is very difficult. Let us try an indirect approach instead.

Experiment Setup
Let us start with a set of notes or Swars. We create another set of notes, which differs from the first set by a given number of notes. Differences include omission, inclusion and modification of a note.

Now let us ask the following questions based on this experimental setup:

• For all pairs of notes that differ by exactly one note, is there always a difference in the emotional response, assuming the generated music is rendered the same way?
• Let us keep the first set of notes constant. Let us generate all sets that differ from the first set by one note. Do all these newly generated sets differ from each other in their emotional response?
• If the number of notes changed is small, is the change in expression, if any, correspondingly proportional?
• If we generate a second set that is completely different in all notes (complete inversion), do we get high separation in the resultant emotions?

First Insight

Most Raags that differ from each other in exactly one Swar have different emotions attached. 

Second Insight

The resultant change in emotion does not seem proportional to the size of the change.

Third Insight

Raags that have the same set of swars, just different in the rules of transition can have markedly different emotions attached.