Kan-swars deal with grace notes or touch notes. Since “touch” means Sparsh in Hindi, these grace notes are often referred to as sparsh-swars as well. Other than being executed vocally, kan-swars (or sparsh-swars) can also be executed on instruments. There are three ways of doing this: using a swift short glide (meend or a ghaseet), a Sparsh (not to be confused with the sparsh-swar) and a Krintan.

Sparsh (the technique) is a special way of playing a note on plucked stringed instruments. The direction of note is ascending. For playing R G, the forefinger of the left-hand is placed on R and plucked and before the sound dies out, the middle or ring finger is placed with force on G so that G is clearly audible without right-hand plucking. Here the main note is G while R is the sparsh-swar.

This is a two-note sparsh followed by 3-note sparsh on the sitar. Please note that phrases like , are sparsh played from the open first string of the sitar.
On the sarode, we hear a series of 2-note sparsh beginning on the three open strings, S M followed by a series of regular 2-note sparsh in different octaves. Next, is a series of 3-note sparsh. Finally there are phrases like R P -M, P -n and D R - . In all three cases, the sparsh-swar is four notes away from the main swar.
Buddhadev Das Gupta plays a variety of sparsh in a short jod section in raga Kafi Kanhada.

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