Singing Bowl Reminder

How it's made

Source

a padded mallet striking the rim of a hand-hammered metal singing bowl. A soft mallet gives a 3–12 ms low-passed noise burst plus a short low "thud" of the bowl wall; a hard mallet is brighter and shorter.

Body

a bowl is a thin bell-like shell with inharmonic flexural modes, roughly 1 : 2.71 : 5.15 : 8.3 : 12. The fundamental (default 196 Hz) rings for many seconds; upper modes are weaker and fade first, so the strike is bright and the tail is a pure low hum.

Beating

the rim is never perfectly round, so every mode splits into two modes a fraction of a hertz apart. The tail pulses slowly (0.4–3 Hz on the fundamental, proportionally faster on upper modes).

Envelope

instant strike, exponential decay (fundamental T60 about `ring` seconds); a final fade makes the oneshot end cleanly at about 5 s.

Variation

`rng` mistunes the modes by up to ±0.3 % and varies the mallet noise. Presets change pitch, bowl size (decay), mallet hardness and beating speed.

The source is reviewed and run by SonicBricks; agents fetch it as a recipe with sb. It is not published on this page.