Play Harmonium Online — Free, In Your Browser

What Is a Harmonium?

The harmonium is a hand-pumped free-reed keyboard instrument that became central to Indian classical, devotional, and film music after its arrival from Europe in the 19th century. Air driven through metal reeds produces its signature nasal, sustained tone — a sound now inseparable from bhajan, kirtan, qawwali, and countless Bollywood soundtracks. Unlike a piano, the harmonium has no attack decay: notes last exactly as long as you pump air and hold the key, which is why the bellows control matters as much as the keyboard itself.

How to Play the Online Harmonium

1. Keyboard: press the letter keys Q W E R T Y U I O P for white keys, and the number row 1 2 4 5 7 8 9 for black keys.
2. Bellows: drag the handle on top of the instrument — pushing right increases volume, like a real harmonium bellows.
3. Drone: turn it on to hear Sa and Pa, the two notes that anchor any raga. Pick Harmonium for a sustained reed drone, or Tanpura for a plucked string-like cycle.
4. Sustain: hold Space and the notes keep ringing after you release them, just like a piano pedal.
5. MIDI: plug in a USB or Bluetooth MIDI controller and it will be detected automatically — velocity-sensitive.

Sargam: The Indian Solfège

Click the Notation button to switch between Western labels (C, D, E…) and Sargam (Sa, Re, Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha, Ni). Sargam is relative — Sa moves with whatever tonic you pick — so changing the drone root also shifts the name of every note. This is the foundation of Indian classical singing and instrumental practice.

Ragas Included

Select a raga from the Raga dropdown and the keys outside the scale are dimmed, so you can explore the melodic structure without hitting wrong notes. Included ragas and their Western equivalents:

• Bilawal — Major scale (Ionian)
• Yaman — Lydian, the most popular evening raga
• Khamaj — Mixolydian, thumri and light classical
• Kafi — Dorian, folk and semi-classical
• Asavari — natural minor, afternoon raga
• Bhairavi — Phrygian, deeply devotional closing raga
• Bhairav — morning raga with komal Re and komal Dha
• Malkauns — pentatonic late-night raga
• Marwa, Todi, Puriya Dhanashree — complex ragas with chromatic color

Record & Share

Click REC in the top-right to capture what you play. Stop and the file downloads as a WebM audio clip (convert to MP3 with any free tool if needed). The share link button copies a URL that preserves every setting — raga, drone root, octave, reeds — so collaborators open the instrument in exactly the same configuration you left it.

Install as an App

Web Harmonium is a Progressive Web App. On Chrome, Edge, or Safari you can "Add to Home Screen" and it will launch full-screen with its own icon, no browser chrome, and work offline after the first load. No app store, no install fee.

About the Sound

The samples are recorded from a real Indian harmonium at Yale's Euterpea Studio, released to the public domain (CC0). We use nine sampling points (every ~3 semitones from C3 to C5) and Tone.js's web-audio sampler interpolates between them, keeping pitch accurate even at the edges of the range. Additional reeds are layered via chorus, mimicking the way physical harmoniums stack multiple reed banks of slightly detuned pitches.