Stobhas — the Meaningless Syllables

If you listen to a Sama Vedic chant — almost any recording will do — the first thing you notice is that you cannot follow the words. Even if you know the verse it is based on, even if you can pick out a familiar phrase here and there, much of what the singer is producing is not language. It is hum, hau, ha, hoyi, ho, long sustained vowels, syllables that mean nothing at all. These are the stobhas — and they are not decorations. They are the music.

A stobha is a non-lexical syllable inserted into a chant to carry the melody where the words run out. The Rig Vedic verse on which a saman is based is, in pure word count, fairly short — usually three or four lines of metric verse. The melody the Sama Veda places over that verse is much longer — sometimes five or six times longer in performed time. The mismatch is solved by stobhas. Where the verse has no more syllables to give, the chant inserts a sustained huv or ha and keeps the melody going. The vowel can be held for many beats, ornamented with pitch-glides, repeated, varied.

The standard repertoire of stobhas is fairly small — huv, hau, ha, hoyi, ho, hoi, om, hau-vu-vā, a few others — but the way they are deployed across a chant is exact. A particular saman calls for a particular stobha at a particular point in its melodic structure. You do not improvise the stobha any more than you improvise the melody. The Sama Vedic manuscripts mark the stobhas alongside the verses, showing exactly where each non-lexical syllable falls.

The most important stobha is Aum itself. The Chandogya Upanishad, the Sama Veda’s great Upanishad, opens by telling the meditator to contemplate the syllable Aum, the Udgitha — and the Udgitha, as we saw, is the central section of the saman. The text is treating the sacred syllable Aum and the Sama Vedic stobha as the same thing. Aum, in the Upanishadic understanding, is the stobha that contains the universe; the other stobhas are smaller cousins of it, each holding its own portion of the chant. The Sama Veda is the original setting in which Aum lived as music before it became philosophy.

There is something philosophically interesting in the whole stobha phenomenon, and the Upanishadic tradition was alive to it. A stobha has no meaning. It is pure sound. And yet a Sama Vedic chant cannot do without it — the meaningful words alone are not enough to make the song. Sound, the tradition is implicitly saying, is sacred even when it is not speech. The voice raised in melody, without saying anything, is already doing what the chant exists to do. The words anchor; the stobhas carry.

For a reader new to all this, the right way to approach a stobha is not to try to translate it (you cannot — it means nothing) but to treat it the way you would treat the held note of a singer who has reached the climax of a phrase and is sustaining the sound past the end of the word. That sustained sound is the stobha. The whole Sama Veda is built on the trust that such sounds, repeated and ordered precisely enough, become something sacred in their own right.