Tuning of Gamelan and Sensory Dissonance 

As a Javanese, It's so mindblowing to hear your explanation. Pretty much all my life I listened to Gamelan on radio and entertainment events like shadow puppet, and that explains why it doesn't sounds out of tune at all to me.

Why is this video so unknown? The amount of research and detail is marvelous. Thank you!

Overall a well-researched video, and I appreciate that you mention the very salient point of how tuning is not consistent across octave registers (although the *reasons* for that are, I think, beyond the scope of this sort of explanation). What's missing though (and Sethares is guilty of this as well) is the indigenous music theory perspective and how tuning relates to the formation of scales and modes as they are actually used in practice. For example, the statement that there are "no fifths" in slendro or pelog is misleading. True, there are typically no *just* fifths of ~702 cents. Slendro is in fact conceptualized as a closed circle of five wide fifths and pelog an open circle of seven narrow fifths. These fifths ("kempyung") are considered the most important interval after the octave ("gembyang"). The importance of fifths is revealed both in notation and the system of modes ("pathet"). For instance, seven-tone pelog (because there are pelog ensembles with fewer tones) can be represented as a chain of narrow fifths (~660-690 cents): 4-1-5-2-6-3-7 ...with the interval 7-4 being analogous to the tritone in the Western diatonic scale. At least in the more well-known Central Javanese tradition, the three most common sub-scales are 4-1-[5-2-6-3-7] 4-[1-5-2-6-3]-7 [4-1-5-2-6]-3-7 ...meaning that despite being a seven-tone system, the actual *music* performed in pelog is essentially pentatonic with occasional "accidentals" or "modulations." Now, it's important to note that many compositions original to either pelog or slendro can be realized in the opposing tuning system (for the ones that cannot, it's more a matter of aesthetics/convention than a theoretical problem). This is only possible because a kempyung in pelog is assumed functionally equivalent to a kempyung in slendro despite the clear difference in tuning; pelog 4s and 7s typically become slendro 3s and 1s, respectively. For anyone interested in going deeper, I highly recommend Karawitan: Source Readings in Javanese Gamelan and Vocal Music (recently digitized and available through JSTOR). It's a compendium of writings by Javanese theorists translated into English.

I've always found something entrancing about Indonesian music. It makes us aware music has many levels of harmony outside of the 12-tone temperament that has taken the world, it can achieve a different dimension of expression because it harmonises in a way western temperament does not. In a way, as 12-tone became more dominant across the world, we are actually constricting our musical imagination if we do not preserve these unique harmonies of other cultures.

It’s like a giant, clangy middle finger to all those snooty music theory nerds that kept telling me “there’s no such thing as C-flat.”

The explanation in this video is very useful. Actually I come from Indonesia, Central Java to be exact. when I was in elementary school I played gamelan with my friends taught by my teacher. but I never knew what the theory in gamelan was like because I only played it. now when i grow up and watch this i understand about what i used to play. but it's a shame nowadays gamelan music is fading and very few people still play it.

The insight about gamelan tunings relating to the spectra of metallophones is mind blowing. That makes so much sense. Makes me wonder if similar relations could be found in other music traditions that contain non-western intervals. I guess if those traditions have flutes or string based instruments at their core though it's unlikely, unless the construction of their particular instruments introduces inharmonicity. VERY INTERESTING AMAZING VIDEO.

The very simple idea of basing your tuning on the metallophone instruments instead of a string blew my mind away. I am going to share this in a music producer group. It totally makes sense! Also it made me realize why I was struggling to fit in bell like sounds in music.

very cool. i came here after searching "gamelan music theory". i wanted to know why the music sounds so dissonant, and i think this answers my questions very well. it's interesting that the tuning of the instruments is so different to western tuning.

This is the most informational crisp video I've seen recently. The visuals and editing are perfect for explanation. Your clarity of the scientific concepts helped me expand my understanding a lot more.

I had not even considered about different scales arising due to the different spectrum of the instruments. This video has given me many things to think about and I now realize how tied to the nature of strings our Western music is. It makes me wonder what would have happened if we didn't bother with Pythagoras and his strings and had focused on other instruments instead. Thank you!

by the way, there are three kind of gamelan. Javanese, Sundanese and Balinese. Sundanese also incorporate their own system. Both Javanese and Balinese gamelan only have two kind of tuning, slendro and pelog, while the Sundanese have three, slendro, pelog and degung.

A very complete explanation, there is a pelog scale in a wind instrument that you don't know about, namely a wooden tube flute with a harmony pelog scale 😊

For someone who is not as deep in the topic it would have made sense to demonstrate with sound examples. I wanted to know more about the gamelan scales and your video is full of information but I could not understand half of it because I had no idea how it sounds, for example the differences between the two gamelan scales and how they are different from western scales. Your video is very helpful nevertheless. Thank you very much!

This is so well made and well researched, it gives a whole new perspective of ethnic music from Asia (Indonesian music)

Its been my dream to see this music performed live. I thought it was just a rare and forgotten form of music but I went to Indonesia and I heard it in many places. At the airport, on the street and a few other places. And I was lucky enough to see it performed live several times. I heard it coming from a Hindu temple in Bali and they were nice enough to invite me in and watch them practice and record them. They even invited me to their next practice. So amazing. I loved Indonesia.

Out of the tens of thousands youtube videos I’ve watched over 18 years this might be one of the most interesting. So well researched well presented, well edited, and well written. I will be sharing I hope your channel blows up man this is great

Amazingly informative. Thank you so much!

Wow, tons of info packed into this video, well done!

This video is incredibly well made! You've broadened my understanding and opened the door to new topics for me to investigate. Thank you!

Very interesting! Thank you for sharing!

Amazing video! Thanks for covering this, so, so interesting!

Thanks for the video! That's exactly what I've been searching to begin to understand how this thing works!

Very well done. Great informative video.

this is such a great video, thank you

i appreciate the very deep insight, thanks for the great video!

Wow - what a well researched, thorough and well presented video. Thank you!

This video was well made and well researched. Thank you for helping me learn!

This is an amazing video, it's so under viewed. Thank you for your effort, it's the most thorough explanation on RU-vid!

Great educational material, very interesting👌

Great explanation!

Thankyou so much - this is brilliant

What a beautiful video; Thank you so much for making it. Subscribed :-)

incredible video !!!

This is such an incredible resource and yet it it is so under-viewed. Please keep going and find a way to sustainably post more material like this!

Really appreciated the explanation, thanks a lot

This is sooo helpful thanks!

Thanks uploader , iam from west Java Indonesia.

Yo awesome video! I'm trying to recreate some of the sounds of a gamelan with FM synthesis and this was super comprehensive with the tuning system. Thanks!!! :)

Thank you so much for your clear explanatiob！

thank you for this video!!!

Wow, thanks for sharing such information, this makes a lot of sense! It leaves me wondering about the synth patches I make and how well the timbre of them could be suited to alternative tunings. This is pandoras box i fear,,, but I think this is possibly the future of music theory

Spectacular and wonderfully done video. 1,000 thanks from Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil!

I love your english speech. Your speech and intonation are clear 😊😊😊

Fascinating. 🖖

Just want to say that your videos are very good and you should make more about the sethares theory of harmony because I had a hard time understanding it until I found your channel.

Hi! I watched your video, because I listened to the #IHarmU challenge and it sounded quite the same, after listening to it half an hour. Gamelan was a nice change to my ear. I was lucky to live in Indonesia in the 80ies and have been listening to it live. Thanks for the superb job on explaining this Musik and the tuning behind it. I watched your other videos as well. So great explanations! Thanks a lot!

Thank you I am a Javanese and have absolutely no ideas about this. I really enjoy your explanations.

Thank you so much!

In the cultural background which gamelan was invented - the Javanese people believe in harmonic composition of multiverse within layers, all of them are represented in gamelan ( "Gamel" means mastery (Based on Sanskrit language), and "Gamelan" might be intepreted as sets of disciplinaries to mastery life, performed as an ensamble).Some of composition are performed in particular time of special events & places as contemplative ceremony. Perhaps,...there's something related with "Binaural frequencies".

The fascinating thing about these "foreign", sometimes "alien" sounding tunings, is that as much as their tunings sound to us, OUR western tunings sound alien to THEM!!! I tell my students that music is just like language, what you don't understand will sound novel and out of this world, just like Chinese would sound to an American, even though both languages are made with the same structures of the mouth!!! Micro tonality is so fascinating!!!!!

This is very interesing

Grazie!!!!

I fell in the music theory hole. Started with getting recommended what pop songs are not in 4/4 time signature -> every time signature explained as Nintendo Music -> Forgotten Isle - Super Mario Odyssey -> this video.

mind blown

the information in this video is incredibly thorough, thank you so much for making this! i'm indonesian and i used to play gamelan when i was a kid, but i had no idea about the music theory behind it, so this is very helpful.

would be interesting if there's further study about the different kind of frequency tuning that related with the different nature of biological ear frequency response between ethnically.. as scale is same in pentatonic but maybe on each note there's a slight different in frequency value maybe between Javanese and Sudanese or even among Asian that their traditional music use pentatonic scale..

Excellent science in the vibrations and harmonics, could be better on the the theory and what is gamelan section. Not a gamelan maestro, but I've played and taught it for 12, hit me up if you'd like to update your info!.

heavy metals, literally 😉

Those tunings are so alien to the European tradition, but those examples sound pentatonic! Why?

Sip lek

12:28 I am pretty sure minor seventh minima corresponds to 7:4, not to 9:5. You can even see how it appears at the moment when fourth harmonic of the higher sound touches the sevenths harmonic of the lower one. And the unmarked minimas are 7:5 (the tritone one) and 7:6 (subminor third).

Great video explaining the gamalans

Thanks for making this video, it's really clear and well researched! I was wondering if you could explain/link the method for deriving the graph at 12:20 from the simple dissonance curve at 11:50? I understand the general idea but I'd love to be able to construct it myself in Excel so I can apply it to other non-harmonic timbres as you've done for the Saron. Thanks!

I really interested on such discuss but about Sundanese tuning too

Lots of interesting things here, but I'd suggest that for gamelan the tuning shapes the instruments far more than the instruments shape the tuning. As someone who has played lots of different Balinese gamelans, instruments tuned to slendro can be physically virtually identical to instruments tuned to pelog. I haven't done a harmonic analysis on the instruments as you have, but this suggests to me that the maker shapes the overtones to match the dissonance curves of the desired tuning rather than the dissonance curves shaping the tuning. It is interesting either way, but is a different causality.

Thank you, im indonesian...

What do you use to analyse and draw charts?

my fretless bass is staring at me as i watch this

I think you say somewhere that a gamelan can only play one mode. But on a modern Balinese semaradana gamelan, you can play 3 different modes - selisir, tembung and selendro.

"Balinese gamelan has specific tuning peculiarities." Please, please, please, do a video on those peculiarities, or on Balinese gamelan in general.

Hello! I really enjoyed the video. I just have a question. I wanted to recreate the "gamelan metallophone sound" through synthesis. I should use additive synthesis and create beatings between the frequencies in the spectrum right? I am using a slendro pathet to write the piece, but i ve got no clue on how to recreate that dissonance, or would it jus tbe easier with an lfo? idkk synthesis' not my strong suite n this is for my exam :) plz help

purgatory type beat

thank you from a Javanese.

Hello Seva! I am glad to tell you that your video is a great help for me, as I am currently writing a paper about balinese gendèr wayang and the musical compopsition within. The graphs you have used showing the dissonance distribution are very interesting. I have two questions for you in hopes you can help me. - at 14:21 you have shown the dissonance curves following the example of Plomb & Levelt, but adapted to different instruments in slendro. You have mentioned getting the data from casadamusica. However I would like to find the "median" tuning for gendèr barung and the gendèr panerus. Can you explain further how you created the dissonance spectra? - I have seen that you have created your own xentonality app. (It is so well done, congrats!) The direction of my paper is a different one, since I want to condense the basic rules of gendèr wayang into a PureData patch witch a visual and interactive landscape for learning purposes. However I would like to refer to you and your great work. So: is it okay for you if I put a ink to your xentonality app in my paper? Thank you for all your time and effort!

À 12:30, Il y a une erreur d'interprétation dans le graphique Sensory Dissonance. Ce n'est pas minor 7th (9:5) mais (7:4). En cents, (7:4) c'est 969 et (9:5) c'est 1018. Par ailleurs les deux autres notes blues, (7:6) à 267 et (7:5) à 583, sont clairement distinguées.

Traditional Javanese music group named themselves after the set of gamelan they're playing. So, instead of who's playing the group is more what's playing. Maybe because of how difficult it is to change the tuning of a set. That makes each set of gamelan is considered sacred. For example "Gamelan Kyai Kanjeng". Kyai kanjeng is the name of the gamelan set, not the people playing it. But this makes it expensive and difficult for a group to perform in far away places considering how heavy a set of gamelan is and like many other traditional things, it's not drawing that much money nowadays.

Can I please have a link or URL for the Gamelan Bali site (7:30). Thanks.

Just discovered this style of music. Very interesting. Do you know other music genres seen as microtonal from a western perspective?

Very informative!

12:31 What's the unmarked interval just below 600 cents?

Which country is the speaker/presenter from?

From a physics standpoint it's not technically correct to say that non-modal frequencies get attenuated out. They are not produced in the first place. When you pluck the string, the shape left by the plucking motion travels away from the point of contact as two copies traveling in opposite directions. These traveling waves then get reflected by the bridge and the nut resulting in a periodic waveform. Periodic waveforms consist of harmonics which are discrete and separated in frequency. The reason you see all frequencies in a spectrogram is because of the initial discontinuity of sound and a tradeoff between time and frequency resolution of Fourier transforms.

There are three gamelan! You forgot Sundanese!! And degung tuning--a special type of pelog tuning.

Are you Portuguese?

Ada indonesia coy

I like all the people who will watch this video

i like pelog than slendro

Lot of work went into it, but you as a video maker need to kind of demonstrate what you are talking about and make it a bit more exciting than just showing graphs and talking in a monotoneous voice.