Singing Bowls

Posted on 3 January, 2010 in "Instrumentation", Demos

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The new year has begun, and I’m building a library of sounds and textures for future pieces. I’m starting with what I call the ‘background layer’. Think of it as the ambience/pulse/backdrop/undercurrent: eliciting a particular mood and providing structure to the piece.

I’ve heard this instrument in many performances but I didn’t know what it was… and I’ve always been curious to learn more. This particular instrument has many names, but the name I hear most often is the Singing Bowl. It’s a hard metal bowl, either hand-hammered or machined, and it is typically used in meditation routines. I really like its sound… the attack is somewhat diminished compared to other tuned percussion instruments and it produces a very nice, sustained tone with a long decay. The harmonics and overtones are very pleasing. It’s perfect for manipulating on tape.

This particular recording was made through a very simple process. First, I found a singing bowl performance on YouTube:

I used Audio Hijack Pro to extract the audio, and edited the resulting AIFF file in Audacity.

Step 1: Edit track for length, reverse the track.
Step 2: Copy and paste audio from step 1 into a new stereo track, speed up by 33%
Step 3: Copy and paste audio form step 1 into a new stereo track, decrease speed by 33%
Step 4: Mix, render, export as mp3.

It was a fun exercise to see what’s possible with this instrument. I want to get my hands on a few of these bowls, and explore this further.