Comment on ?The bronze chime bells of the Marquis of Zeng: Babylonian biophysics in Ancient China? by E. G. McClain

Abstract

Study of the bells and other instruments uncovered in the fifth century BC tomb of the Marquis Yi of Zeng promises a contribution to the fields of history of science, technology, and culture of such magnitude that it should command the attention of experts in many fields around the world. Professor McClain makes this observation himself in an addendum to his article, circulated privately under the title ‘Some personal observations of Chinese bells, with special attention to interiors’. ‘Babylonian biophysics’ is the first technical article on the bells by a non-Chinese writer that has garnered the interest of the Chinese. Huang Xiangpeng of the Central Academy of Music, a key researcher on the bells who is cited by McClain, plans to have the article translated into Chinese for distribution in China to musico1ogists.t I began writing this article in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, site of the ancient state of Zeng. I have had the pleasure of making two study visits to the Hubei Provincial Museum, where the bells are now on display. The director of the museum, Professor Tan Weisi, is co-author of one of the key articles cited by McClain, analyzing the musical properties of the upper tier bells, especially McClain’s Ib and Ic, the two sets on the west wall upper tiers. Writing on the subject of tuning systems with Tan is Feng Guangsheng, a young scholar of musicology with whom I have also had the pleasure of discussing the bells and their tunings. Chen Zhongxing is director of the preservation department and is in charge of making replicas of the bells. Ordinarily, the availability of replicas would not be exciting, but there are two extraordinary things about these. First, the appearance of the replicas, even under close scrutiny, is impressive. They are visually indistinguishable from the authentic set. But the acoustical properties of the replicas are even more astonishing. The museum claims that both the lower