Frame Drum Research Articles

Sound designing classical guitars through metamaterials

An approach is presented to alter the sound of a classical guitar using a metamaterial structure. By adding additional masses using magnets in a row between the bridge and the soundhole, a bandgap of around 300 Hz appears. Alternation of magnet masses and placement determine the location and strength of the bandgap. A similar approach was presented with a frame drum [R. Bader, J. L. Fischer, M. Münster, and P. Kontopidis, “Metamaterials in musical acoustics: A modified frame drum,” JASA 145(5), 3086–3094 (2019)]. There, the lower and upper limits of the bandgap are caused by the relations between the frequency wavelength and the magnet distances. With the guitar, the bandgap is caused by a shifting and attenuation of modes. Interestingly, the added masses cause a decrease in the guitar top plate mode frequencies, which is similar to membrane behavior and contrary to the expectancy of a plate. Such a guitar sound is unique due to the strong bandgap and cannot be achieved with typical alternations of changed fan bracing or top plate thickness. Magnets can easily be applied by guitarists within minutes and, therefore, qualify as a guitar sound design chosen by players.

Only Pottery Drums in the Stone Age?

Hundreds of possible prehistoric pottery drums made in Central Europe, mainly from the Late Neolithic (especially the TRB culture) have been found. Their forms vary from funnel-shaped, goblet to hourglass. It is not difficult to imagine equivalent or alternative forms of drums made from hard plant tissues, which are missing in the archaeological record during these or even other periods. Aside from a thought experiment based on archaeological knowledge, experimental and experiential research is presented here with three main examples of wooden drums – a simple frame drum from a branch imaginable since the Palaeolithic, a cylindrical double-headed drum made from a log with a rotten inside, and a wooden alternative to a TRB goblet drum that is compared to a ceramic replica of the same type of TRB drum in terms of material characteristics, technology, tools, skill, productions costs, time requirements and durability. The experience and results prove that simple frame drums are the fastest and the easiest option, followed by cylindrical drums made from logs, however production costs of wooden vessel drums greatly exceed those of pottery ones. Thin walls make ceramic drums much worse in terms of manipulation, playing and durability, but fairly better in clear and loud sound production. The presented examples are closely related to Central European prehistory, but they may serve as valuable analogies to other geographical or cultural contexts as well.

Making It Magical

Making It Magical

Non-destructive mapping of stress and strain in soft thin films through sound waves

Measuring the in-plane mechanical stress in a taut membrane is challenging, especially if its material parameters are unknown or altered by the stress. Yet being able to measure the stress is of fundamental interest to basic research and practical applications that use soft membranes, from engineering to tissues. Here, we present a robust non-destructive technique to measure directly in-situ stress and strain in soft thin films without the need to calibrate material parameters. Our method relies on measuring the speed of elastic waves propagating in the film. Using optical coherence tomography, we verify our method experimentally for a stretched rubber membrane, a piece of cling film (about 10 μm thick), and the leather skin of a traditional Irish frame drum. We find that our stress predictions are highly accurate and anticipate that our technique could be useful in applications ranging from soft matter devices to biomaterial engineering and medical diagnosis.

Lagu Malaysia Truly Asia Sentuhan Ahmad Nawab: Sebuah Penjenamaan Bangsa Berakarkan Rumpun Nusantara

Since 1972, Tourism Malaysia has been making efforts at branding Malaysia as a unique tourist destination in South East Asia. In this process, songs play a significant role. In 1999, Malaysia Truly Asia was composed by Dato’ Seri Ahmad Nawab and it became the most iconic song for the ministry's branding campaign. The song was initially recorded in English and later translated into seventeen languages for international markets. This song introduces and highlights cultural heritage musical elements of the three main ethnic groups in Malaysia: the Malays, Chinese and Indians with a touch of kompang (single-headed frame drum), Kelantan Wayang Kulit (shadow puppets) music, serunai (quadruple reed wind instrument), tabla (a pair of double-headed drums), accordion and seruling (flute). National songs represent and build kinship amongst Malaysians who associate themselves with a more ‘authority-defined’ ideology because it is based on ethno-national politics as a result of colonial legacy. This article discusses the concept of ‘nation branding' used as a marketing tool for the tourism sector of Malaysia. Any nation branding effort for Malaysia will always be infused with elements of historical heritage within the archipelago that are hybrid and shared. Symbols of historical heritage that are firmly intertwined within the performing arts culture live within the soul of Ahmad Nawab. Naturally, he embodied and imbued this into a popular song until it became accepted by many as the Malaysian identity. Keywords: Nation branding, historical heritage, hybrid history, tourism, popular songs.

Marhaban As A Form Of Qasidah Music Continuity In The City Of Binjai, Northern Sumatra Province

This paper describes Marhaban as a form of continuity of Qasidah music, and also describes the existence of this music in the city of Binjai, as an Islamic art. This paper focuses on the discussion of Marhaban, which after being studied in more depth is a form of music that is the same as Qasidah music, both in terms of use, text, presentation, and instrumentation. Researcher use functional theory to describe the social musical context. Then use Halliday’s semiotic to analyze the text of Marhaban. To analyze the musical and instrumentation, I use ethnomusicological structure theory. This paper is a qualitative descriptive study using data collection techniques and methods of literature study and observation, which is used to explain how Marhaban is also a form of music that emerged as a continuity of early Qasidah music in Indonesia. The results are: Marhaban always used in Islamic ceremony, as marriage, circumsition, birthday, and so on. The text of Marhaban in Arabaic, with it’s theme about the histpry of Prophet Muhammad and way of life muslim. The intruments are: rebana (frame drum), and human vocal. The structure of melody used Near East system maqamat plus Malay melody improvisation (called cengkok).

Bodhráns, lambegs, & musical craftsmanship in Northern Ireland

ABSTRACTFrom its humble beginnings as a ritual instrument, the bodhrán or Irish frame drum has developed into a globally recognised percussion instrument that is found in diverse contexts. This research is about the sophisticated, technical development of this instrument by the drum maker Seamus O'Kane during the height of the Northern Ireland Troubles. The brilliant organological experiments and innovations of O'Kane, altered the bodhrán's design contributing to a rapid expansion of new performance practices and increased interest in the drum. One of O'Kane's signature innovations was the use of skins from the unionist lambeg drum. O'Kane had to precariously negotiate paramilitary politics and drum making in Northern Ireland in order to produce a superior instrument. This paper explores the complex, intertwined nature of Irish political dissidence in County Derry during the Troubles in relation to far-reaching developments in bodhrán drum making. O'Kane's bodhráns, which he continues to make in his County Derry-based workshop, draw from both Irish republican and unionist drum making traditions. This blending of traditions has enabled him to produce an innovative, tunable drum representative of the shared musical cultures of Northern Ireland within a violent, politically divided milieu.

Metamaterials in musical acoustics: A modified frame drum.

Mechanical musical instruments have a restricted timbre variability compared to electronic instruments. Overcoming this is the aim of extended playing techniques as well as building more sophisticated musical instruments in recent years. Metamaterials might be a way to extend timbre of mechanical instruments way beyond their present sound capabilities. To investigate such possibilities, a frame drum is manipulated to achieve different sounds. On the drum membrane of 40 cm diameter, a ring of masses is attached in three diameters, 8, 10, and 12 cm with 10 masses each, leading to a cloaking behaviour of vibrations from within the ring into the area outside the ring and vice versa, as shown by microphone-array and high-speed laser interferometry measurements. The resulting sounds have a band gap between about 300 and 400 Hz to about 700-800 Hz, depending on the ring diameter. The 8 cm diameter ring shows the strongest amplitude attenuation in the band gap. Still, when striking the membrane outside the ring, it sounds like a regular drum. This leads to a tremendously increased variability of musical articulations, especially when striking in the ring, as a band gap sound cannot be produced by a regular drum.

Metamaterials in musical acoustics: A modified frame drum

Acoustic metamaterials have properties not found in nature, like negative stiffness, cloaking behavior or frequency bandgap damping. This is achieved by complex geometries often constructed out of multiple subunits in sub-wavelength size. Although also musical instruments often have complex shapes, like guitar or piano soundboards with regular fan bracing, metamaterials have not explicitly been used here. As an example, a modified frame drum is proposed with increased sound possibilities by adding masses to the drum membrane arranged in a circle. Such structures have been shown to have cloaking behavior. Using microphone-array and laser interferometry measurements it is shown that such a drum has a frequency-dependent cloaking behavior. When struck at the center of the added circle most energy above about 400 Hz stays in the circle and decays strongly. Such a sound cannot be produced with a regular frame drum. When struck outside the circle the drum sounds very much like a regular drum without added masses. By gradually changing the playing position from the circle center towards the circle rim, frequencies above about 400 Hz are gradually added. Therefore such a modified frame drum has much more possible sounds and therefore ways of musical articulation.

Queer Form, Quiet Frame: A Sense of Alaska Native Aesthetics in Emily Johnson's The Thank-You Bar

Queer Form, Quiet Frame:A Sense of Alaska Native Aesthetics in Emily Johnson's The Thank-You Bar Katherine Brewer Ball (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Emily Johnson, The Thank-You Bar, 2009. Photograph by Cameron Wittig. Image courtesy of the artist. The stage is sparsely lit and musicians JOEL PICKARD and JAMES EVEREST enter, one at a time, taking turns recording a broken apart country-western song. The sounds of the pedal steel guitar roam across the empty stage. Everest [End Page 307] plays his guitar with a bow while Pickard runs what looks like a piece of red iron rod along the neck of his own guitar. In a ragged Merle Haggard whisper that sounds like a yell, Pickard bends down into his pedal steel guitar and asks: "Do you have a story to tell? Is there something you need to say?"1 The ambient music is tinny, distant, and soft. Everest and Pickard's recorded and repeating sounds recall a Western film, a white man walking alone amid a barren landscape with tumbleweed at his ankles. The thick sonic reach of the slide guitar is like the slow lull of a drone. The eerie soundtrack of westward expansionist violence and dispossession collides with the small town comfort of a country-western jukebox. When the music stops and the lights go down, we hear a noise that sounds like a big flat frame drum. Thump. Thump. Thump. Choreographer and dancer Emily Johnson slowly thumps out on stage with short stilts made of wooden two-by-fours with what look like square camping lights affixed on the ends. Thick bluish lines are drawn on her legs; they come apart at the top, like two rivers flowing in reverse, or varicose fish-skin veins. Wearing a short blue sequin onesie, Johnson somersaults between the stilts and lies down flat against the ground. The small square stilt lights face upward, and she sings, "I am so lones-oo-oo-ome" drawing the word out in a descending wail. This is the opening of Johnson's The Thank-You Bar, which premiered in Anchorage in 2009; it is a dance piece Johnson made as a kind of love letter to growing up Yup'ik in Alaska, a desire to re-root herself back into the ground after having been away for fifteen years. In this essay, I sit with the complex theorizations of quiet, indirectness, and place in Johnson's The Thank-You Bar. I argue that Johnson's work provides a way to imagine Alaska Native aesthetics and histories without fixing them into what Gerald Vizenor has called the "fugitive pose." Vizenor describes the freeze-frame of Native representation, where Indigenous peoples are caught in the pictorial and become simulations of themselves in the "pageantry and portraiture of dominance."2 The image of "the rustic reservation indian" in the early twentieth-century anthropological lens of photographers such as Edward Curtis signals the erasure of Indigenous peoples through the overdetermination of the Indian simulation. Thinking with Vizenor, I explore the sensory and epistemological frames that might make it possible to experience Johnson's work outside the "poselock" of Native representation in anthropology or art [End Page 308] history.3 Engaging recent work on queer formalism, brown aesthetics, and Black articulations of quiet, I argue that Johnson's work offers a way into imagining contemporary Alaska Native art and performance as a sovereign Indigenous practice. I examine moments of indirectness in Johnson's performance where the body's choreographic vocabulary moves in quiet excess of what David Getsy calls "compulsory self-disclosure."4 Writing alongside Johnson's mode of performance, I listen closely to her multi-sensory methodological propositions to risk a descriptive strategy of writing in-step with Alaska Native art. Focusing on description, on the slow roll of detailed visual and sonic observations, I take my methodological cue from the formal structures put forth by Johnson and in conversation with other Indigenous artists, including Sonya Kelliher-Combs (Iñupiaq/Athabascan) and Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Unangax). Examining Johnson's resignifications of skin and secrets, I argue that her work opens up a generative way of reading and...

Religious Encounters: Empowerment through Tamil Outcaste Folk Drumming

The performance of the folk paṟai frame drum of South India is a site of religious encounter that syncretizes symbols and practices from Hinduism, Christianity, Tamil agricultural life, and Dalit liberation movements. This essay analyzes three cases of religious syncretism and indigenization of Christianity to Tamil village culture that transform the meaning of this drum from polluted to a sonic tool of liberation against caste oppression.

Acoustic sensitivity of the saccule and daf music.

The daf is a large Persian frame drum used as a musical instrument in both popular and classical music which can induce a percussive sound at low frequencies (146-290 Hz) with peaks of up to 130 dBspl. The percussive sounds have a power distribution in the region of saccular sensitivity. In view of the saccular stimulation by sound in humans, we decided to use cervical vestibular-evoked myogenic potentials (cVEMPs) to evaluate the possibility that the daf music may have a disturbing effect on saccular function. During this case-control study, 18 daf musicians were compared with 20 healthy individuals evaluated in the audiology department of the Hamadan University of Medical Sciences. Assessment consisted of pure tone audiometry, tympanometry, and cVEMPs. Multiple comparisons of mean the cVEMPs and mean hearing loss at 250 Hz among the three groups (affected, unaffected, and normal ears) were significant. There were no significant differences between all daf players on high-tone loss at 3000 Hz. The daf musicians had bilateral unsymmetrical sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL), with hearing loss at 250 Hz (low-tone loss) and notched audiogram at 3000 Hz (high-tone loss). Eleven musicians with decreased vestibular excitability as detected by abnormal cVEMPs had mild (26-40 dBHL) low-tone loss and significant abnormal cVEMPs findings. In contrast, the others had slight (16-25 dBHL) low-tone loss with normal cVEMPs. Exposure to daf music is related to both saccular and cochlear dysfunction. Exposure to daf music is related to both saccular and cochlear dysfunction.

Minton Sparks at the Cumberland Mountain Storytelling Festival, Palace Theater, Crossville, Tennessee, November 1, 2013

Minton Sparks takes the stage of the Palace Theater in Crossville, Tennessee, like an avenging angel of the order of rural Southern womanhood. Carpetbag dress and sensible heels, bone leather purse broad and deep enough to carry a family Bible and a .44 Magnum, she stakes out a tight arc between the music stand freighted down with texts at her right hand and her remarkable musician John Jackson to her left behind a palisade of guitars and foot pedals. She paces that stage space, one hand clutching the mic to her chin and the other hand treading air as if weighing whether to preach or to fly. In one piece she struts like a gaggle of gossiping hens. In another she opens that purse, inventorying the contents of a life both lived and unlived, revealed and deeply hidden even from its bearer. Her performance poetry brims with unconstrained voices, conversing in a glossolalia both intelligible and opaque, though all the words and phrases are from some channeled font of Delta English.Hers is a sturdy, evocative performance persona: outer garment of tough feminine Americana imagery and attitude, with an inner lining blended of literary and slam poetry techniques, all stitched together with a satiny underscoring of blues licks and hymn tunes. It is a fabric that is unique on the storytelling circuit, at least in the United States, where music, poetry, and narration tend to be broken into more discrete segments. Diane Ferlatte's recent work with Eric Pearson combines traditional and personal narratives with blues guitar accompaniments, and tandem duos such as Barry Marshall and Jere Burns of the Storycrafters often weave musical interplay into their arrangements. In the early 1990s the late Julie Portman and husband Paul Reisler performed fully accompanied theatrical narratives, one-woman plays with guitar and dulcimer backdrops that stylisti- cally seemed to just miss connecting with storytelling audiences. Collaborations between storytellers and musical accompanists are relatively common in Britain (e.g., Hugh Lupton with Chris Wood on fiddle and guitar, Xanthe Gresham with Arash Moradi on frame drum and saz, Robin Williamson with his own folk harp), where the connection to bardic antecedents are vividly sensed and sought. There are a number of singer-songwriters whose mix of folk ballads and elaborated song introductions constitute a subgenre on festival stages. What sets Sparks apart in this era is the cool precision of her free-verse narratives in visual and aural coun- terpart with the unsettling fidelity of her vocal and clothing impersonations-all eerily echoed by flowing guitar loops drawn from the John Fahey catalogue of ruminative American Gothic.A flaking, putrid pink-skinned womandecays in a four-poster bed,eyes the size of chicken eggsthat could have been laid this morningand sold this afternoon . . .faceless relatives shuffling around her bed,embarrassed to acknowledge the specter.Images this stark are vanishingly rare in the storytelling world constituted around family-friendly events. Yet the literary format relieves the audience of its habitual guilty retreat into sentimentality. Sparks's oral interpretive stance poses her fixed texts as sensed intermediaries between performer and audience, absolving them of the social obligation to play nice. The peculiar sprung torsion of the free-verse lines repels conventional resolutions, and her narratives suspend themselves in contemplative space, balanced on the point of a fading guitar note in a bracing solution of wonder and horror.The Palace Theater is a vintage small-town Main Street movie house, lovingly restored as an arts center. The proscenium is elevated above the usual height of a storytelling platform, and the seats, tilted backward toward the stage, are rather too comfortable for full alertness on the part of the genteel, snowy-headed audi- ence. This is the conservative, Medicare-eligible demographic that has overrun the festival-based flank of the storytelling movement, while younger, hipper audiences have gravitated toward open-mic Moth-style personal story nights now filling urban venues. …

The effectiveness of music on pain among preterm infants in the neonatal intensive care unit: a systematic review.

Review question/objective The objective of this review is to synthesize the best available evidence related to the effectiveness of music as pain relieving method among preterm infants during painful procedures in the neonatal intensive care unit. Review questions are: Among preterm infants in the neonatal intensive care unit, is music effective in reducing - pain scores? - physiological pain indicators? - behavioural pain indicators? - hormonal pain indicators? Inclusion criteria Types of participants This review will consider studies that include preterm infants (i.e. born at or before 37 gestational weeks) in neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) Types of intervention(s) This review will consider studies that evaluate any type of music (recorded or lived music), which is implemented for premature infants by a music therapist or any health care providers during painful procedures. Comparator No music intervention (the infant will receive the usual care based on the routine practices in the unit) Types of outcomes This review will consider studies that include the following outcome measures: level of pain measured by pain scores and/ or physiological (e.g. hearth rate, blood pressure, respiration, oxygen saturation), behavioural (e.g. cry, facial expression, movements, sleep-wake state) and hormonal (e.g. blood glucose, cortisol level, catecholamine acids) pain indicators.

Iberian drums

As one would expect, this excellent book is strongly based on the medieval iconography of the area. Not only does it describe the two types of frame drum—the circular form, the pandero or panderete, which became widespread throughout Europe and is still with us as our tambourine, and the square form, the adufe, peculiar to Iberia and the Mahgrib—but it goes much further than that. Mauricio Molina goes into considerable detail of the historical use of the two instruments and the social status and gender of the players, and, as a practical musician, he also goes into the ideal construction of the drums and their performance practice today. This last aspect is one on which I believe we should be careful. I have written much on this subject myself, in books and articles, the latter going back to the second issue of Early Music, and while I am wholly in agreement with the author so far as medieval Iberian music is concerned, we should remember that the music of that peninsula—with its strong links to North Africa, and its multi-cultural life in its days of racial and religious tolerance over much of the Middle Ages—was very different from the music of the rest of Europe, with the possible exception of Italy. The variety of strokes and techniques, well described and illustrated here, still characteristic of Arabic music today, should not be applied in the carefree way which we too often hear in performances of the northern European estampies and ductias, without very serious study of their suitability to the musical customs and styles of their cultural area and era.

The muse's journey: transcultural translators and the domestication of Hindi music in Hausa popular culture

The diffusion of entertainment forms made available through small media technologies has created transnational pathways for the adoption, appropriation, adaptation and domestication of entertainment forms in African mediascapes. In Muslim northern Nigeria, the most common transnational entertainment template is Hindi film and music from the Indian Bollywood film industry. The popularity of Hindi films has stimulated an appropriation strategy that relies on onomatopoeic translation of lyrics from popular Hindi film soundtracks, which are reworked so that they become part of the Muslim Hausa entertainment space. This article traces the antecedent Muslim Hausa onomatopoeic tradition rooted in Hausa shamanism, tsibbu, which reworks selected verses from the Qur'an as vocal amulets to ‘cure’ various ailments. The cure relies on the vocal harmony between the Qur'anic verses and appropriate Hausa equivalents. This practice eventually found its way into popular culture mediated by the massive popularity of Hindi films, which saw local Hausa musicians using vocal harmonies from Hindi film lyrics and reworking them into Hausa versions. This process was strongly entrenched in the performances of the Ushaq'u Indiya (Society for the Lovers of India), a Sufi bandiri (frame drum) group in the heart of the city of Kano, northern Nigeria. The Ushaq'u Indiya's performance repertoire consisted of reworking the vocal harmonies of Hindi film lyrics into Hausa versions in which the Hausa lyrics sing the praises of the Prophet Muhammad. This onomatopoeic translation strategy thus domesticated Hindi film soundtracks and lyrics.

Reconstruction of radiating sound fields using minimum energy method

A method for reconstructing a pressure field at the surface of a radiating body or source is presented using recording data of a microphone array. The radiation is assumed to consist of many spherical radiators, as microphone positions are present in the array. These monopoles are weighted using a parameter alpha, which broadens or narrows the overall radiation directivity as an effective and highly intuitive parameter of the radiation characteristics. A radiation matrix is built out of these weighted monopole radiators, and for different assumed values of alpha, a linear equation solver reconstructs the pressure field at the body's surface. It appears that from these many arbitrary reconstructions, the correct one minimizes the reconstruction energy. The method is tested, localizing the radiation points of a Balinese suling flute, reconstructing complex radiation from a duff frame drum, and determining the radiation directivity for the first seven modes of an Usbek tambourine. Stability in terms of measurement noise is demonstrated for the plain method, and additional highly effective algorithm is added for a noise level up to 0 dB. The stability of alpha in terms of minimal reconstruction energy is shown over the whole range of possible values for alpha. Additionally, the treatment of unwanted room reflections is discussed, still leading to satisfactory results in many cases.

The Role of Live Music and Singing as a Stress-Reducing Modality in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Environment

Among the developmentally supportive care modalities that have been tested in the treatment of preterm infants, music interventions have been tested quite intensively. This article reports on the environmental, cultural, and philosophical considerations of a research program that studied the effects of live music, wordless singing, and rhythm upon neonates in a Middle Eastern NICU hospital unit. The cultural setting and dynamics of the NICU created a unique challenge which involved the discovery of music as an intervention that effectively enhanced communication within a culturally divergent population. At the same time, music decreased stress and increased a sense of humanity in the intensive care unit setting. Keywords arts medicine, maternal singing, NICU music therapy, wordless singing, live healing music, frame drum

‘This Drum I Play’: Women and Square Frame Drums in Portugal and Spain

The Iberian double-skinned square frame drum, known as adufe, or pandeiro quadrado (Portuguese) or pandero cuadrado (Spanish), is played almost exclusively by women, and is a legacy from the medieval period. While Spanish and Portuguese women play various round frame drums (as elsewhere in the Mediterranean), the focus of this article is on the square drum and its role in several aspects of secular, religious, and ritual life. The essay also explores the ways in which the songs women sing while playing the drum reflect their thoughts, concerns, and circumstances. Discussion also covers recent innovations, especially those involving men taking up the drum in performance contexts, and women's reactions to this.

The Frame Drum in the Middle East: Women, Musical Instruments and Power

Dans de nombreuses regions du Proche-Orient, la pratique du tambour sur cadre est associee aux femmes. Compte tenu du statut specifique de la femme et de la musique dans la culture musulmane du Proche-Orient, cette pratique musicale, instrumentale et feminine, permet l'examen des relations intersexes et de pouvoir. Apres une introduction generale sur les tambours sur cadre et les femmes, les instruments de musique et le pouvoir et la musique instrumentale dans la pensee islamique, l'A. retrace l'histoire du developpement de ces tambours au Proche-Orient (Mesopotamie, Egypte, les sources bibliques hebraiques, les sources pheniciennes-chypriotes en Palestine, l'antiquite grec et romaine, les cultures arabes et perses anciennes). Elle aborde ensuite les questions suivantes : la musique et la femme dans l'Islam, avec notamment des exemples ethnographiques personnels provenant d'Afghanistan ; la sexualite et le pouvoir en relation avec le tambour et la danse ; la relation entre musique, sexualite et pouvoir masculin.