Recently I’ve been trying to figure out what is special about mridangam and was wondering if I needed to do some analysis myself. Fortunately, I happened to run into CV Raman’s papers analyzing the physics/acoustics/wave forms of a mridangam that are well worth a read.
He first wrote his short paper in 1920 in Nature (almost 100 years ago) http://dspace.rri.res.in/bitstream/2289/2042/1/1920%20Nature...
his fundamental thesis/analysis is that the way the mridangam is built is special in that produces harmonic tones (integral multiples of frequencies) which is highly unusual for drums therefore giving it the ability to sound uniquely special, accompany vocal well and to be played in a smaller, softer setting.
A good blog delving into all of this including some cool youtube videos at the end on wave spectroscopy demos using talcum powder (related to raman) are at https://croor.wordpress.com/2010/11/10/cv-raman-on-drums/
A longer version of his paper from proceedings of IIS published in 1934 is here: http://dspace.rri.res.in/bitstream/2289/2047/1/1935%20Proc%2...
Figured some of you would be interested in this.