Exploring the Many Tunings of Balinese Gamelan

Abstract The study of gamelan tunings has a long history, both within Indonesia and among the many foreign researchers who have sought to reconcile those tuning systems with ideas and practices of Western music. Challenges arise because Indonesian gamelan and Western tuning systems are based on fundamentally different concepts and principles. This article introduces and describes the Gamelan Tuning Explorer (GTE), a Max patch intended to help facilitate, through visualization and adjustable parameters, greater understanding of certain core aspects of Balinese gamelan tuning—specifically, the nonstandardized tunings used for gamelan gong kebyar, a large orchestra of bronze-keyed metallophones, tuned gongs, and other instruments. The GTE incorporates measured tuning data from 47 complete gamelan gong kebyar; each encompasses about 150 keys and tuned gong chimes. Forty-two of these tuning data sets were collected in the mid 1970s by American ethnomusicologist Andrew Toth, who spent decades in Bali engrossed in research on this topic; five were remeasured by the authors in 2019 to document how they had changed over the ensuing decades. In addition to collecting this treasure trove of data, Toth identified several key conceptual ideas of Balinese gamelan tunings. These include the consistent use of ombak (the prominent beating of two paired notes played in “unison”); the relationship of paired-tuning ombak to octave treatment; the stretching and compression of octaves, both by register and by note; the Begbeg versus Tirus models of intervallic formation; and more. Toth's data and each of these tuning concepts have been analyzed in two previous articles (Vitale and Sethares 2021; Sethares and Vitale 2022). We seek to make these concepts more immediate and accessible with GTE by using a graphical, interactive interface. Each of these parameters can be explored by the simple manipulation of a slider or other interface element. The corresponding changes in the sound can be readily heard, and visualized with interactive Toth plots—graphic representations of gamelan tuning profiles developed by Toth and named in his honor. This article describes a series of observations enabled by GTE.