Drones' Anatomy and Cultural Background:

From India to Japan, Over Australia and Back to Scotland.

Presented to
Prof. Eldad Tsabary
EAST 200: Aural Skills

By
Nadejda Volkova

Concordia University
April 23rd 2014
 Volkova Drones' Anatomy and its's Cultural Background 2

Melody as a musical unit has been built at least in the western history of music upon bass

instruments's chords in order to create harmony. But there are not only chords that can serve as the base

for harmony. The drone, continuous sound evolving around a tonic note of a certain frequency, has

served the purpose of creating harmony in many cultures across the globe throughout music history.

For the purpose of this essay, I have selected to study the use of drones in Indian traditional music,

Japanese's court music Gagaku, the drone of the didjeridu in Australian Aboriginal Chants and the

drones of the Great Highland Bagpipe of Scotland. My aim was to target drones from cultures as

different as possible in order to determine what really makes the definition of “drone” and to provide

data for creative purposes, for example, synthesizing a drone in an audio software through a signal

generator. First, I will go through these different drone's histories and the characteristics of the

instruments on which they are played. Then, I will provide comparisions between these drones different

wave shapes through close-ups of the waves and comparision of the presence of overtones in the drones

through spectrograms.

Drone and its “bassic” history: India, Japan, Australia, Scotland

As unrelated as the music from these different countries may seem from one another, the use of

drones in northern India's hindustani music, Japanese Gagaku and Scottish bagpipe was mainly to give

a tonic reference upon which melody or chanting was built. Apart from the Australian aboriginal music

where the didjeridu was used as a solo instrument for dancing (Kaeppler, web), instruments like the

Indian tanpura, the Japanese gagaku biwa and the drones from the Great Highland Bagpipe served to

create a tonic reference for the music being performed. In this sense, it is much like western's Baroque

music notion of basso continuo, a continuous bass line played on a harpsichord, cellos, bassoons or

other low instruments, or basso ostinato, where repeated notes of a bass instrument are used to build

the rest of the music upon it. It holds a harmonic function. “By extension, the term ostinato is also used

to refer to any short musical gesture repeated over and over again, in the bass or anywhere else,
 Volkova Drones' Anatomy and its's Cultural Background 3

especially one used as a building block for a piece of music. Ostinatos are found in most of the world's

musical traditions. This is not surprising, since the formal principle they embody is so very

fundamental: Set up up a repeating pattern and then pit contrasting musical elements against it (Kerman

and Tomlinson, 87)”. Drones produced through the tanpura, the gagaku biwa and in the Great Highland

Bagpipe where holding the same position in traditional music performance.

In Hindustani music, the melody is sung over a drone produced by the string instrument the

tanpura. The solfege of indian music is made of symbols called the svars, and the tanpura holds the

tonic as tonal reference for the singer and other melodic instruments.

“The seven solfège symbols (Sa, Re, Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha and Nī in short-form) used in Indian art
music are called svars (svaras in the Carnatic music tradition) (Danielou, 2010; Bagchee, 1998).
With the exception of Sa (also referred to as Ṣaḍja) and Pa (also referred to as Pancham, fi  h
with respect to Sa), every other svar has two or three variations, where each variation is either a
komal (flat), śudh (unmodified, literally means pure) or tīvr (sharp) of the basic svar and has a
specific function in a rāg rendition (Viswanathan & Allen, 2004) (Gulati et al., 54)”.

As well as the tonic, the drone may also hold the fifth, fourth and the seventh svar depending on

the piece being performed (Gulati et al., 56). Therefore, the tone of the drone of the tanpura is

composed of the tonic, and of chords resulting in a particular sound upon which the singer relies for the

pitch of his melody singing. Here is a spectrogram of a tanpura being played accompanied by melodic

chanting took from Gulati's et al. research:

The tonic of the drone in this graph is composed of a frequency at about 180-200Hz and is

played in chord with the upper Pa at about 260Hz. From this graph we can also deduce that the tanpura

played in this chord presents overtones below 150Hz and between 350 and 450Hz. The graph doesn't

go above these frequencies thus its impossible to tell if there are higher frequencies composing the

traditional hindustanic drone but what is important to conclude is that the drone here is dominantly of

mid-low frequencies composed by a chord between two notes played at an interval of a fifth,

sometimes forth or seventh as mentioned before.

The Japanese gagaku biwa is also a string instrument much like a big lute. It also plays the role

of a ground tone, tuned in different modes depending on the story being told by the gagaku being

performed, below is Schneider's description of biwa tuning (56).

Contrarily to the tanpura, the biwa is not plucked but staggered with a plectrum of different

sizes, and is tuned on a pentatonic scale, with chords of ascending broken fourths if tune in the 1 st or 5th

mode (Schneider, 56). The resulting drone is thus not sustained as long as in the tanpura but rather

melismatic, like a beat with a sharp attack and its tones decaying in reverberations. The notes used to

compose its chords are also of low frequencies and like the tanpura may be composed of intervals of

fourths, but due to the tuning the sum of the heard overtones with the tonic, the frequencies heard and

the staggered playing results in a drone sound particular to Chinese or Japanese music and distinct from

Hindustani music. Nevertheless, it is still used for its harmonic function for the melody.

Contrarily to the popular recalling of bagpipes as a Scottish instrument, “Explorations have

unearthed illustrations of bagpipes from Algeria, Greece, Russia, and India, and it is suggested that

three centuries ago bagpipes could be found in virtually every European country (McCoy, 1-2)”. My

concern for the Great Highland Bagpipe is because it uses at the same time 3 drones.

“The Great Highland Bagpipes typically feature 3 drones playing in unison with the keynote A4
of the chanter. Two tenor drones play at A3, an octave below the key note, and one bass drum
rumble at A2. Octave-apart drones are characteristic of the scottish pipes, but other none-drone
intervals persist in non-Highland pipes. The belows-blown Lowland pipes feature two drones
with a size ratio of 3:2, a musical interval of a fifth (McCoy, 7)”.
In comparison to the previous Eastern instruments used for drones, the bagpipes tuning would be of a

mixolydian mode on the A scale on the piano, “where two out of the three sharped notes for A-major

are sharp but the third, G, remains natural (McCoy, 4)”. To add to that, the tuning of A is not the

traditional 440Hz but rather around 470Hz (ibid). Also, the drones are octave apart continuous tones

rather than chords played with an interval of fourth, fifth or seventh. This causes the drones to create

beat frequencies if the bagpipe is not well tuned. “Beat frequencies in bagpipes result when two notes

having two close frequencies (typically within 10 Hz of each other) sound simultaneously, producing a

pulse at the difference frequency between the two notes (McCoy, 8)”. Here is the depiction of a beat

frequency in a bagpipe (Seeler, web):

The interaction of both frequencies create a third one which cycling does not coincide with the previous

2, resulting in stops when the zero point is crossed, hence resulting in pulsating beats.

If the A tuning of the Great Highland Bagpipe is of 470Hz, we can calculate using the formula

F = {[(2)^0.08333]^n} * (frequency of middle A) that A3 is equal to about 235Hz and A2 is about

118Hz. To transpose from one octave to the other we either multiply or divide by 2.

Therefore, a drone of 235Hz and another in 118Hz is a drone of a mid-low frequency. As in the eastern

instruments seen before, the drones of the Great Highland Bagpipes is also a bass sound, except since it

is played through blowing, it is even more sustained than the plucking of the tanpura, not speaking of
 Volkova Drones' Anatomy and its's Cultural Background 7

the staggered biwa drone sound. To add to that, the Great Highland Bagpipes drones are octaves apart

while the drone tones played on the biwa or the tanpura are composed of chords with intervals of 4 th,5th

or seventh. The Great Highland Bagpipe thus brings a totally new sound to the variety of drones used

in music.

Lastly, since we spoke of the blown drones of a bagpipe, I'd like to discuss the drone of the

Australian didjeridu. The didjeridu is traditionally a long cylindrical pipe of about 1.5m long,

sometimes shorter, that is produced through the action of termites who eat the dry wood at the core of

the live eucalyptus (Fletcher et al., 1205). The termites leave a honeycomb like structure that can be

cleaned with a long stick and desired smoothness is achieved afterwards with different cutting tools

(ibid). The sound is produced by blowing and vibrating cheek skins and lips, sometimes vocals are

added during blowing therefore layering higher frequencies over the drone, which frequency ranges

between 55-80 Hz. Compared to the tanpura, biwa and the Great Highland Bagpipe, the sound of the

drone of the didjeridu is thus the lowest of all.

“It is straightforward to calculate the acoustic input

impedance for this idealized model, and the results

are shown in Fig. 1. Over the range of interest for

the vibration of the lips, near 70 Hz, the impedance

is almost purely resistive and about equal to the

characteristic impedance of the bronchus, 2x10^6

Pa s m^−3 , and the same is true in the range from

about 0.5 to 3 kHz that is of interest for the vocal-

tract resonances leading to sound formants

(Fletcher et al., 1206)”.

Fletcher et al. measured the resistance of the emission of frequency against the blow of a

perfected model of lungs, this relation they illustrate as “impedance”. Much like any stationary object,

the work applied to get a movement started is higher at the beginning than once the object is in

movement. It is true for acoustic vibrations as well. Thus the resistance is higher at the beginning of the

blow and emits lower frequencies and as the “acoustic inertia” of the instrument is fought, higher

frequencies are produced shortly before falling back around a particular sustained drone tone, in this

case, of 70Hz. Like the drone in the bagpipe, the didjeridu's drone is sustained through blowing and is

thus more continuous than the plucked tanpura or the staggered biwa, but because of its attack due to

resistance against blowing, the sound of the didjeridu is characterized by a morphing from a very low

to very high frequency before finding its sustained drone tone, which is different from the bagpipe's

crescendo drone behaviour when blowing.

Experiment: Do drone waves from similar origins share common characteristics?

From India to Australia, flying by Japan and Scotland (perhaps in a parallel universe it is

possible), drone's history have shown that its use was primarily for harmonic structure in the music of

these cultures. Like a building block upon which melody is constructed, the drone is used similarly to

the bass in western culture. To add to that, curiously, all these drones are of mid-low tones as well. I

was curious to compare the shapes of the sound waves of the drones of a tanpura, biwa, didjeridu,

Great Highland Bagpipe and an electric bass. I have used for this purpose sound recordings found on

youtube that I saved and zoomed onto the waveform in an audio software called “Audacity”. My theory

was that, as a western instrument, the Great Highland Backpipe should share similarities in its sound

wave with the electric bass as both are western instruments and that the biwa and tanpura should be

similar too since they are both middle eastern, and that the didjeridu would have an almost clear

sinusoidal wave due to its continuous sustain sound that do not feature as many overtones as the

tanpura and biwa since string instruments usually feature a lot of overtones. Here are the results first as
 Volkova Drones' Anatomy and its's Cultural Background 9

waves, then as spectrograms:

1) Wave shapes:

Tanpura

This recording features a tanpura playing a sustained drone. The zoomed out note demonstrates that

although the sound is sustained, it features silences and attacks as the string is plucked again. The

zoomed in wave features an interesting mix of a square and triangle wave.

Satsuma biwa

The satsuma biwa is another biwa instrument, therefore it features the same wave behaviour as the

gagaku biwa, except its drone is higher pitched, and is also used for harmony building. Because its a

staggered instrument, here you have first a note staggered with its long decay that behaves like the
 Volkova Drones' Anatomy and its's Cultural Background 10

drone. The second picture features a close up of the sound wave during attack: a fast oscillating

sawtooth wave with a high amplitude due to the impact of the staggering. The last picture shows how

the wave unfolds slowly during the decay, moment during which the tone of the drone is easier to hear

as the higher frequencies of the overtones have diminished considerably in amplitude.

Great Highland Bagpipe

In this recording, the drone is heard separately from the melody only at the beginning. I normalized the

wave at -1 dB since its amplitude was rather small, in order to view the shape easier. The drone of the

Great Highland Bagpipe features a square wave, not perfect due to noise and overtones, but we can see

the peaks are rather flat.

Didjeridu

I included the wave's beginning so we can see the blow that creates the didjeridu drone is composed of

an attack quickly shifting in amplitude as the higher frequencies die out to leave place for the drone.
 Volkova Drones' Anatomy and its's Cultural Background 11

The second picture demonstrates that the soundwave of a didjeridu is triangular with a fast period.

Electric Bass

This is a recording of John Paul Jones, bassist for Led Zeppellin, playing Ramble On on his electric

bass. The recording is that of his bass isolated. I wanted to include the wave shape of the electric bass

as drones and basso ostinatos share similar qualities of being low pitched and used for building

harmony. In the first picture, the soundwave is broken among the several notes that he plays thus the

reason of the presence of all these attacks. The second zoomed in picture shows a beautiful round

sinewave shape with a fast period.

2) Spectrograms

Tanpura
 Volkova Drones' Anatomy and its's Cultural Background 12

Biwa

Didjeridu

Great Highland Bagpipes

Electric Bass
 Volkova Drones' Anatomy and its's Cultural Background 13

In these spectrogram, the frequencies with higher amplitudes, thus more “energy” are shown in

brighter colours whereas frequencies with lower amplitudes are paler, tending towards white. The

drones, as low frequencies with smaller amplitudes, that we are interested in are located in these pale

colours.

Through comparing the wave shapes of these different drones my theory of the biwa and

tanpura sharing similarities in shape, as well as the electric bass with the Great Highland Bagpipe, was

way off reality. Of course, the bass and the bagpipe are instruments of two entirely different families,

therefore it makes sense that their wave shapes are so contrasting. However, if one compares the

spectrograms of the bass, bagpipe and didjeridu, the lower frequencies characterising the “droniness”

of these instruments contain way less overtones than if we look at the biwa and tanpura's spectrograms.

Indeed, the later share the same characteristics of not have a particularly well defined drone in terms of

tones since the pale parts are constantly sliced by the bright colours of the harmonics. They are string

instruments after all, however the bass is quite clear of overtones in its drone. To add to that, the eastern

drone instruments featured in this essay feature drones that are higher in pitch than the bagpipe, bass or

didjeridu.

After analyzing physical characteristics of these different drones, I hope I have provided enough

data to play with in a creative context and musical experimentation. One wishing to add a touch of

Hindustani or Gagaku might use this data for creating a drone reminding these cultures, while one

wishing to give a “tribal” sound may use this data to emulate a didjeridu. The drones from the different

presented cultures do have their own colours and thus connotations of cultures and places. But more

than adding a colour, the drone may also be the main object of interest in a musical movement!

Throughout the history of western music, from medieval polyphonic liturgical chants to the

development of harmony and melody in classical orchestras, the complexity and experimentation and

need for emotional meaning behind the creation of music, there has been several shifts of the meaning
 Volkova Drones' Anatomy and its's Cultural Background 14

of the art of music. Contemporary musicians even tried to distance themselves from the musical

discourse through experimental music and minimalism. The drone also have its place of glory, raising

from a simple building block for harmony to a musical movement, thanks to La Monte Young and his

music such as Composition 1960 #7. La Monte Young's influence on drone music was very

inspirational to german Krautrock and popularised even more as an aspect of main musical interest in

modern bands like Stars of the Lid or the composer Ben Frost. But the history of “dronology” is a

whole other chapter.

Bibliography

Brown, Corey. “Led Zeppelin: 'Ramble On'– John Paul Jones Isolated Bass (Isolated Bass Week)”. No
Treble.com, 2012. Web. 22 Apr. 2014.

“Calculate the Frequency of Pitches”. Efn.org (members). N.p.N.d. Web. 23 April 2014.

Fletcher, N. H., et al. "Vocal Tract Resonances And The Sound Of The Australian Didjeridu (Yidaki) II.
Theory."Journal Of The Acoustical Society Of America119.2 (2006): 1205-1213.Academic Search
Complete. Web. 22 Apr. 2014.

Gulati, S.,Bellur A.,Salamon J.,Ranjani H. G.,Ishwar V.,Murthy H., &Serra X. “Automatic Tonic
Identification in Indian Art Music: Approaches and Evaluation”. Journal of New Music Research 43.1
(2014): 53-71. Web. 22 Apr. 2014.

Harich-Schneider, Eta. “The Present Condition of Japanese Court Music”. The Musical Quarterly, Vol.
39, No. 1 (Jan., 1953), pp. 49-74: Oxford University. Web. 22 Apr. 2014.

Kaeppler, Adrienne L. “The Music and Dance of Australia”. Garland Encyclopedia of World Music
Volume 9 Australia and the Great Pacific. Ed. Kaeppler, Adrienne L. & Love, J.W. Routledge: 1998.
Web. 23 Apr. 2014.

McCoy, Jill. "Piob Mhor Revealed: The Story and Music of the Great Highland Bagpipe." (2006).
Anton. “Didgeridoo, tone key-d.WAV”. Freesound.org. Web. 23 Apr. 2014.

Oestrich, Klaus. “Klaus Pipe Solo”. Youtube.com. N.p. 2014. Web. 23 Apr. 2014.

Seeder,Oliver. “Tuning the Bagpipe: Basic Principles and Random Advice”. Oliver Seeder's Universe
of Bagpipes. Hotpipes.com (2005). Web. 23 Apr. 2014.

WINDYSOUNDS. “Dan-no-Ura by Junko Ueda satsuma-biwa in Caunes Minervois, France”.