ABSTRACT
As is very well known, there have been quite a number of studies investigating aspects of tone-systems, scales, and tuning in the music of Java and Bali. Since the measurements and speculations of Alexander John Ellis (1885) it has been customary to interpret a number of non-European scales as equidistant, among them several of South-East Asia, and Indonesia as well as Thailand in particular.1 While the view that for instance laras sléndro belongs to the group of equidistant scales is still advocated here and there, the basic assumptions of such a hypothesis have rarely been taken into account. The goal of the present paper is thus to discuss some issues relevant to the theory of equidistant scales on the one hand, and acoustical facts related to gamelan instruments on the other. We hope to demonstrate that any theory of scales derived from the measurement of idiophones (xylophones, metallophones, lithophones) must consider the acoustic behaviour of this class of instruments which of course is also relevant to pitch perception. It will be shown that especially with respect to xylophones, metallophones, etc., pitch is quite complex and can by no means be equated with the perception of a ‘fundamental’ or any other single frequency component. Therefore, frequency measurements as they have been applied to tonometric research on gamelan instruments, can produce results that are ambiguous or even misleading. To speak of laras sléndro as an ‘equidistant five-pitch scale’ in our opinion asks for some clarification of what is understood by ‘pitch’, and also for a few remarks on the concept of equidistance which, to be sure, is a mathematical construct that has been adopted in both the fields of psychology, especially psychophysics, and musicology.
