Ringing Stones and Fountain Bowls

Eva Rudy Jansen's book Singing Bowls: A Practical Handbook of Instruction and Use contains this interesting information about "Ringing Stones and Fountain Bowls":

In Asia, the use of sounding objects is very old. For example, the Chinese Emperors had the right to the most beautiful 'ringing stones' - hard stones, such as jade, which produce a ringing sound when they are struck.

The first great Emperors reigned from about 2000 BC. There are records of a Bronze Age culture in China in about 1600 BC, and archeological finds in Northeast Thailand suggest that bronze was already used there about two thousand years earlier.

Such finds show only that bronze articles were made that long ago, but until even older objects are found, it is impossible to say how much further back in history bronze was being worked. It is clear that by the 6th century BC the Chinese were far advanced in the manufacture of metal alloys and in the working of metals, from which they made perfectly tuned bells.

It is difficult to say how many of these bells were made before that time, until earlier finds can tell us more. It is obvious that no culture can suddenly, from one day to the next, produce a tuned bell that weighs more than one hundred pounds, let alone a bell that can produce two different pure tones, depending on where it is struck.

There must be some previous history. The study of sound and the effects of vibrations was so advanced in the 5th century BC that so called 'fountain bowls' were made from that time.

These are bronze bowls with very specific shapes and ddimensions. When such a bowl is filled with the correct amount of water, and the handles attached to the side of the bowl are rubbed in a special way with the palm of the hand, a fountain of water rises up, and a humming sound is produced.

Bowls are still used in Japan, for example, as standing temple bells without clappers. They are made of a black metal alloy and produce a short, rather 'dry' sound.

The singing sound of various metal alloys has been extensively used in the many different goings found in Asia. The discovery that metal objects produce sound was made all over the world, and certainly small, metal, skull-shaped bowls were known around 1100 BC.

With these bowls, you can strike the 'forehead' by the nasal bone and the point of the 'temple' on the edge of the bowl to produce two distinct tones with an interval of exactly a major third apart. That is by no means a coincidence.

In the art of singing harmonics (i.e., producing a higher note above a particular base note by using different resonant cavities in the head and body), it has been shown that the interval of a third remains the same. The makers of skull bowls had already discovered that this is the result of the shape of the skull; the distance between the nasal bone and the temple bone produces a major third.

These bowls are the oldest known objects which can be described as 'singing bowls'.