In learning to play the gong, the musician sees the gong more as an engine that produces a release of resonant power than simply a pleasing musical aesthetic. Gong power has universal implications because it symbolises and releases the all-pervading cosmic rotative force of the universe called AUM or OM, the mythical word of “In the Beginning”.
HOLISTIC RESONANCE
In the New Music Science of Holistic Sound, an understanding of the phenomenon of fullness within Resonance is a fundamental pre-requisite to mastering in a broader context the playing of “The Great Gong of Life”. The musical flat bronze disc called a Symphonic Gong or Tam-Tam is known as a perfect source of Holistic Resonance. The Gong, unlike any other instrument known, when struck by a soft mallet, produces multiple tones in an always-present continuum of sound, no matter what the particular gong’s fundamental pitch may be.
TONE CLUSTERS
Within the great AUM (OM) background of the gong’s total sound arise spontaneous clusters of overtones with no spaces between the tones. These tone clusters have a fullness and unpredictable independence about them, thus they are called living or organic tones and they are simply the result of two equally struck tones combining together to produce sonal bouquets of offspring or tone progeny. Partials and/or Heterodynes (children) are also used to refer to the resultant tones created by tone combining.
RESULTANT TONES
Resultant tones can also be called Summation tones (the result of a higher overtone arising from the combining of two tones of equal intensity of volume when added together). There are also times, depending on the particular frequency ratios of the two combining tones, when a lower tone called a Reduction tone is produced through subtraction. All Resultant tones are a manifestation of organic tone mitosis that reflects elegantly the harmonious cellular reproduction of organic matter. This unique act of tone reproduction is only possible because bronze of a disc shape has such a powerfully long sustain that this allows multitudinous sonal bouquets of tone clusters to flower and bloom within the sound field of an acoustical environment.
FEELING TONES
Because sound travels much faster through metal than it does through air, the slower absorbing air surrounding the vibrating gong becomes thickly packed with reverberations that are called “Feeling tones”. Feeling tones are tones heard not just with the ears but kinaesthetically in a tactile or sensual way. The entire body, as a result of prolonged saturation, becomes like a collective ear when it is touched and communicated with by the accumulation of the long, low waves of full gong sound.
TOTAL SOUND
As layer after layer of rolling waves of sound build in volume, the atmosphere (the envelope) becomes so dense with vibrations that all other sounds in the acoustical environment disappear into a resonant blanket of “total sound”. The ancients refer to this as the OM field of the Akashic Ethers.
DEMATERIALISATION
Total gong sound is truly pure holistic resonance. The experience is wrapped in a cocoon or womb that is so charged with powerful, wholesome tone cell reproduction that at some point the person seems to disappear completely into the sound field. This is a phenomenon that can be called a conscious dematerialisation through sensorial sound saturation. When this happens, the mental, emotional and physical bodies become both super-conducting and super-regenerating and the strain caused by the normal resistance of the ego-identity no longer exists as a disease factor.
Extract from Don Conreaux: Magnum Opus Vol.1
