The Gong Sound Guide

Chinese Tam-Tam 大锣 · dà luó

The broad, unpitched orchestral gong — the sound most people picture when they hear the word. Its signature is the upward bloom: each partial is given a slight rising pitch ramp over the first 380 ms, so the sound swells and brightens after the strike rather than decaying straight away.

Seven partials are layered at deliberately non-integer spacings, topped with four bands of filtered noise that supply the metallic scrape of the mallet hitting bronze.

Thunder Gong 风锣 · fēng luó

A wind gong: thinner, flatter and untuned, played with a soft beater for a roaring crescendo used in film scores and storm effects. It is the tam-tam's mirror image — the partials ramp downward, so the sound sags and darkens as it spreads.

The roar comes from two low-passed noise layers rather than from the oscillators: a short bright burst for the impact, and a longer 380 ms rumble underneath it.

Tibetan Singing Bowl

A standing bell whose rim is struck or circled with a mallet. Its defining quality is not the attack but the beating: a real bowl is never perfectly symmetrical, so each mode splits into two frequencies a fraction of a cent apart, and the pair drifts in and out of phase to produce a slow pulsing shimmer.

Rather than fake that with a tremolo, each partial here is built as a genuine detuned pair, one voice 1.4 cents sharp and one 1.4 cents flat. The interference between them creates the shimmer for free — the same way it happens in the real bowl.

Mongolian Temple Bell

The most aggressively metallic preset, and the only one built with frequency-modulation synthesis instead of stacked sine waves. In FM, one oscillator bends the pitch of another thousands of times per second, generating dense sidebands that are naturally inharmonic — the technique that made 1980s digital synthesizers so good at bells.

Four carrier/modulator pairs are used, each with its modulation depth decaying faster than its volume. The result is a bright clangorous attack that mellows into a pure ring, which is exactly how struck metal behaves.

Wind Chimes

The outlier in the set: not a single strike but a cascade. Five tubes are sounded in a scattered order at 180 ms intervals, drawn from a seven-note pentatonic set. Pentatonic tuning is what makes real wind chimes pleasant — with no semitones in the scale, no two tubes can ever collide into a dissonance, however the wind hits them.

Each tube gets a bright partial at 2.76× its fundamental, the ratio typical of a struck cylindrical tube.

Japanese Temple Bell 梵鐘 · bonshō

The great bronze bell of a Buddhist temple, struck from outside with a suspended wooden beam rather than an internal clapper. Its character is the oshi — a slow swell where the sound takes a moment to gather and blooms to full volume well after the impact.

This is the only preset with a two-stage attack envelope: every partial rises quickly to 30% and then continues climbing to full amplitude, with the higher partials blooming faster than the low ones. The tail runs for sixteen seconds, the longest in the set.

Cathedral Bell

A tuned Western church bell, and the one preset built from a genuine named recipe. Bell founders have shaped bells for centuries so their partials land on specific musical intervals, which are given traditional names: the hum an octave below, the prime, the tierce, the quint, and the nominal an octave above.

The curiosity is the tierce, which sits a minor third above the prime. That single partial is why a large bell always carries a faintly mournful, minor-key colour no matter what note it is cast to — a quirk essentially unique to bells among Western instruments.

Ship's Bell

Small, thick and high-pitched, built to cut through wind and engine noise. At sea it was a clock as much as an alarm: watches were marked in "bells", one added every half hour up to eight, then reset — so eight bells meant a four-hour watch had ended.

Its partial ratios climb steeply and the whole thing is gone in five seconds, which is what makes it read as small metal rather than large.

Grandfather Clock

The warm, domestic toll of a longcase clock's coiled gong rod. Unlike the cast bells above, a struck steel rod is very nearly harmonic — its partials fall close to whole-number multiples — which is precisely why it sounds mellow and unthreatening rather than clangorous.

Two short noise bursts at 4.2 kHz and 1.6 kHz stand in for the hammer's mechanical click.

Classic Synth

The original four-oscillator gong the app launched with, kept for anyone who prefers it. It is the simplest recipe here — four partials at 110, 220, 275 and 385 Hz over a single noise burst — and a useful reference point for how much the extra partials and envelope shaping in the other presets are actually doing.