Singing Bowls

Hi all!
New to the group, pleased to be here.
I was just wondering, have any of you heard singing bowls? When I first heard the Bohlen-Pierce scale they're what I thought of. Does anyone know, am I just hallucinating or are they really close? I think it would be a pleasant experience listening to such bowls.

I looked at the tunings of the bowls and they're things like:
Fundamental tone: G# -2 Hz
Rim tone: D -4 Hz

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "proleax" <ringer_rosy@...> wrote:
>
> Hi all!
> New to the group, pleased to be here.
> I was just wondering, have any of you heard singing bowls? When I first heard the Bohlen-Pierce scale they're what I thought of. Does anyone know, am I just hallucinating or are they really close? I think it would be a pleasant experience listening to such bowls.

I'm familiar with singing bowls. I can't say they've ever reminded me of the Bohlen-Pierce scale, but I have heard some where the interval between the two lowest modes is about a 3/1 (and none where it's about a 2/1), so perhaps you're not hallucinating. =)

> I looked at the tunings of the bowls and they're things like:
> Fundamental tone: G# -2 Hz
> Rim tone: D -4 Hz

This will be completely different for different bowls, of course. Calling them "fundamental tone" and "rim tone" is a little misleading because they are both modes where mainly the rim vibrates. In the fundamental mode the circular rim deforms into an ellipse (so there are four nodes equally spaced around the rim, in a square), and in the next higher mode it deformes into a kind of rounded triangle shape (so there are six nodes, in a hexagon). Even higher modes in this series have 8, 10, 12... nodes. Also note that each of these modes is really a degenerate pair of modes, and if there's some imperfection of the bowl that breaks the circular symmetry, it will split the degeneracy and make two modes of slightly different frequency that beat with each other.

There are whole other series of modes, of course, notably the "drumhead" mode where the rim remains a perfect circle but the bottom of the bowl moves up and down relative to it. This mode is hardly excited at all by playing it the normal way, so it doesn't contribute to the sound, but you can hear the pitch if you flip the bowl upside down and tap sharply on the center.

All this describes the linear behavior of the bowl, such as when you strike it and let it ring, but when you make it "sing" you're exciting it in a non-linear mode-locked way similar to bowing a string, so all kinds of weird non-linear stuff can happen. I think this is one of the main reasons it sounds so interesting, especially in combination with the near-degenerate pairs of modes.

(As you can tell I'm a little obsessed with idiophones right now. I recently figured out how to control two near-degenerate modes of some keys of the marimba I'm building.)

Keenan

I have some and also sample of others. I'm not aware of Tibetean culture embracing BP tuning. However you can certainly get a sample set and use it in BP. Singing bowls are a part of Garritan World sample set and the player uses scala files.
*

-----Original Message-----
From: "proleax" <ringer_rosy@...>
Sender: tuning@yahoogroups.com
Date: Sun, 23 Sep 2012 18:15:06
To: <tuning@yahoogroups.com>
Reply-To: tuning@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [tuning] Singing Bowls

Hi all!
New to the group, pleased to be here.
I was just wondering, have any of you heard singing bowls? When I first heard the Bohlen-Pierce scale they're what I thought of. Does anyone know, am I just hallucinating or are they really close? I think it would be a pleasant experience listening to such bowls.

I looked at the tunings of the bowls and they're things like:
Fundamental tone: G# -2 Hz
Rim tone: D -4 Hz

Thanks guys! I don't think I will be trying this anytime soon but this is encouraging. I think there could be a market for this amongst psychedelia lovers.

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, chrisvaisvil@... wrote:
>
> I have some and also sample of others. I'm not aware of Tibetean culture embracing BP tuning. However you can certainly get a sample set and use it in BP. Singing bowls are a part of Garritan World sample set and the player uses scala files.
> *
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: "proleax" <ringer_rosy@...>
> Sender: tuning@yahoogroups.com
> Date: Sun, 23 Sep 2012 18:15:06
> To: <tuning@yahoogroups.com>
> Reply-To: tuning@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: [tuning] Singing Bowls
>
> Hi all!
> New to the group, pleased to be here.
> I was just wondering, have any of you heard singing bowls? When I first heard the Bohlen-Pierce scale they're what I thought of. Does anyone know, am I just hallucinating or are they really close? I think it would be a pleasant experience listening to such bowls.
>
> I looked at the tunings of the bowls and they're things like:
> Fundamental tone: G# -2 Hz
> Rim tone: D -4 Hz
>

This is among the few posts about singing bowls I could find in this group. They are indeed fascinating; I found this article worth checking out called "Tibetan Singing Bowls" by Denis Terwagne and John W.M. Bush. It's available for download here:

http://dspace.mit.edu/openaccess-disseminate/1721.1/69991
You will be prompted to save a file; this is a PDF document called "69991.pdf.txt". You need to remove the .txt from the file name in order to access it.

Bogdan