Pitch Glide in Chinese Small Gongs: Effects of Macrostructure and Microstructure
Chen‐Gia Tsai, Peiling Huang · 2010
The nonlinear behavior in the gongs has been previously studied by Rossing and Fletcher on the big and small Chinese opera gongs, which have complex shapes and pitch-gliding sounds. There are several kinds of the small gongs in traditional Chinese music. In the present study, we compared four small gongs with two size categories. The Nanguan jiaoluo (NL) and the Nanguan xiangzhan (NX) are small gongs with the radius of 3.0-4.8 cm; the Beiguan xiangzhan (BX) and the Beijing opera xiaoluo (BL) are small gongs with the radius of 9-12 cm. The pitch of NX glides downward, while the pitch of NL, BL and BX glides upward. We used a soft mould to obtain the internal shapes (macrostructures) of these small gongs. The results suggest that the macrostructure alone cannot explain the different beahaviors of pitch glide. The large pitch-gliding of NX and BL (more than two semitones) may be related to their microstructures, namely, the striae on the flat surface.