"Meends" of Hindustani Music & Calculus

A "meend" is a gradual sliding from one musical note to another. For example middle C (Stuttgart pitch) is 264 hertz & D is  264 X 9/8 = 297 hertz. (in "Just" intonation.) In equally tempered scale, it will be 264 X 1.06 X 1.06 = 296.6 hertz, 1.06 being the twelfth root of 2. In a keyboard instrument one has to jump from one to the other directly, whereas in a string instrument like the Sitar, one can glide from one to the other by laterally pulling the string downwards along the fret, taking in all the microtones in between, not to speak of the semitone of C#.

Now this has an equivalent in Information technology, where "bits" of information are digitally stored either as 0 or 1. (like two keys of a keyboard). In analogue processing of information, a continuously varying signal can be handled (like the "meend" in a Sitar).

In Calculus, which can also be called "slope finding", the slope can be easily found in a straight line graph by calculating the ratio of opposite side over the adjacent side (of the triangle of the graph), or the tangent of the angle. In the case of calculating the slope of a curve like a parabola (y=x squared), the slope is obviously different at different points of the curve, but can be found by dividing the curve into miniscule portions, finding its slope & proceeding to the next portion. So, the general slope of a curve like the above parabola is dy/dx = 2X. (Full details of the calculations can be found in "How to enjoy Calculus" by Eli S Pine.)

So to conclude, the "meend" is the processing of microtones between C & D, like processing the miniscule bits of the parabolic curve in Calculus or the continuous analogue processing of data, instead of digital bits as in information technology.