Delicious Music and Euphonic Food

I am an impatient cook - I generally don't enjoy spending too much time making food. In this, my Man Friday is the microwave which I use to prepare rice and boiled vegetables.

But of late, we (my room-mate Gaurav and I) have been enjoying more toothsome dishes, thanks to a third friend (Rajkumar) who joins us during meals. Seated on the floor amidst the vessels and surrounded by soft music, we relish food and banter.

While gathering MP3's from my classmates for making the dinner music CDs, I came upon Rahman's Sangamam film songs. I first heard them during my undergrad days on the college bus's cacophonous player. But still I took to the Carnatic based numbers. A favourite is Saukkiyama in raga Mand.

Listening to these classical-flavoured songs made me curious about how the music is written down such that the playback singer executes it just as the composer had envisioned it. In Carnatic, the music is written down in the solfa notation. There is a lot of music between the documented notes (svaras) due to gamakas, but this can be inferred from the characteristics of that raga. In film songs, the music rarely adheres to a raga strictly, which would make it difficult to re-construct the complete music if it were notated in solfa.

Is there is someone from the film music field who has the answer?