Why a Fifth Plus a Soft Onset Is Always a Singing Bowl

How I got here

Forest is the world with bells and singing bowls. I built it before Space and it worked: soft starts, long tails, and notes a fifth apart.

Then I built Space. It was meant to be the opposite: empty and weightless. Every version I made sounded like Forest again. I changed the instruments. I changed the brightness. I changed the echo. It still sounded like someone had struck a bowl in a temple.

What was doing it

I had assumed the character of a world was in the tone of its instruments. It wasn't. It was in two smaller things that I had carried over without noticing.

The fifth. A perfect fifth is two notes whose pitches are in a simple three-to-two relationship. It is one of the most settled, agreeable intervals there is. It is also how I built the bells and bowls in Forest: each note has a quiet fifth above it.

The soft start. A singing bowl rubbed around its rim has no sharp beginning. The note swells in and hangs. Any sound that fades in gently and then holds borrows that character.

Put the two together and the ear decides it is a bowl. The rest hardly matters.

What fixed Space

Taking the fifth out completely. For a while Space used a whole-tone scale, which has no fifth anywhere in it; I wrote about that in Whole Tones Have No Home. The sounds also got shorter. A Forest bell rings for a long time. A Space sound arrives, has a little body, and is gone, with a distant echo after it.

With those two changes the temple disappeared, and I hardly touched the instruments.

What I took from it

If two things you make keep sounding alike, look at the intervals and the timing before you look at the tone. I spent a long time adjusting the wrong thing.

Sources

• Perfect fifth, Wikipedia: the interval and its three-to-two ratio
• Standing bell, Wikipedia: how singing bowls are played and how they sound