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Failing to Synthesize the African Balafon Style Xylophone Sound
Do you have a hard time recreating on the synth the xylophone sounds from your favorite world music? Do you want to know how to tune the African balafon? The tuning and tone color of an instrument are closely tied together. Keep reading to get info and tips for synthesizing an African balafon style xylophone sound.
How hard is it to recreate the sound of a Balafon on the synth? According to this redditor it’s not so easy:
How is this Balafon tuned… I can almost duplicate the notes on my keyboard, but not quite. It just sounds wrong when I try to play it. (Redditor electrocoder)
The next section talks about how the sound of the instrument affects the tuning.
This article uses technical musical terms. For definitions, see the Glossary at the end of the post.
Video: Hear the Balafon the Redditor Tried to Copy
The African Balafon Style Xylophone Sound
Before we can talk about the tips for synthesizing an African balafon style xylophone sound, I need to go over some background.
Simba Arom and Frederic Voisin conducted an ethnomusicology study where they asked master African xylophone tuners to tune a Yamaha DX7 II synth.
- They created a sound with an inharmonic spectrum.
- What is an inharmonic spectrum?
- Instruments like drums and straight bar xylophones have partials that don’t approximate the harmonic series.
- That in turn affects how the instrument sounds, and by extension, it also affects the tuning.
- Starting with the inharmonic sound they’d created, Arom and Voisin taught the master tuners how to adjust the pitch and timbre on the DX7 II.
To Arom and Voisin’s surprise, the master tuners did not go for a natural sound:
Because the original sounds included inharmonic components… the synthesized timbres must also contain inharmonicity… contrary to what can be observed with the original instruments, in fact, musicians demanded that all slats of a single xylophone present a homogenous timbre.
Furthermore, their optimal judgment of the correctness of the tuning presented to them occurred when all the slats of the xylophone were close to the ideal timbre obtained by synthesis. (“Theory and Technology in African Music.” The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music: Africa. 263-265).
The DX7 II’s programed inharmonic spectrum forced the scale into an approximation of equipentatonic (i.e., 5edo) tuning, which the authors felt represented a conceptual ideal. Once the ideal tone color was found, then the ideal scale could be created.
The Southeast Asian and African Style Xylophone Sounds
Just a little bit more information and we’ll be able to go over the tips for synthesizing an African balafon style xylophone sound.
In Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale William Sethares talks about how tone color and harmony go hand-in-hand.
- Sethares analyzed music from Indonesia (approximately 5edo) and Thailand (approximately 7edo).
- He found that consonance and dissonance in both harmonic and inharmonic spectrum instruments can have a direct impact on a scale’s tuning.
Sethares’ goal was to take samples of instruments and make the partials more inharmonic to match them better with the 5 and 7edo tunings.
Conversely, I like matching the unaltered instrument sound with its ideal tuning. For example, slendro (approximately 5edo) sounds good when played on metallophones, such as you find in the gamelan orchestra. It sounds even better when played on bamboo xylophones.
However, take those same scales and play them on a piano, and it doesn’t sound good at all. Change the music’s tone color by switching instruments, and you’ll dramatically impact whether the tuning works or not.
Try it. Tune your synth to a 5edo scale (see the cent values in the next section). Play it with a piano sound. Then, switch your synth to a metal xylophone sound (like a vibraphone or a glockenspiel) followed by a wooden xylophone sound and see what you think.
Video: How to Tune Gheel and Balafon
Tips for Synthesizing an African Balafon Style Xylophone Sound
Finally, we can now talk about the tips for synthesizing an African balafon style xylophone sound.
The important takeaway: you need to marry the right sound with the right tuning. Arom and Voisin state:
Our experiments in Central African Republic uncovered a scalar concept that relies on three sizes of… intervals – 200, 240, and 280 cents, of which [the] variance does not exceed plus or minus 15 cents…
Furthermore, all the… musicians accepted equally a modal series containing a single interval of 240 cents, a perfect equipentatonic tuning… (266-267)
In other words, the intervals between adjacent bars fell within these general cent ranges:
- 185 to 215 cents with 200 cents as the median pitch
- 225 to 255 cents with 240 cents as the median pitch
- 265 to 295 cents with 280 cents as the median pitch
This gives a wide range for tuning the intervals between bars, which means:
- You should tune the scale by ear using these cent ranges as a guide to the size of the intervals between your keys. (Note: You’ll need a micro-tunable synth.)
- Also, you’ll need to listen to a xylophone or metallophone sound while you adjust the pitch to get the ideal tuning.
Conversely, all the African master tuners found an interval of 240 acceptable. This means that you can just use a 5edo scale, and you’ll be in the ballpark of an authentic tuning:
0 cents, 240 cents, 480 cents, 720 cents, 960 cents
Just make sure you use a xylophone or metallophone sound when playing this scale, because the tuning and tone color go hand-in-hand.
Have fun playing!
© 2023 Geoffrey Keith
Join me for in-person or online lessons today!
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