The Indian musical drums

Abstract

The paper gives a detailed description of the results obtained by the author in the year 1919 which showed that in the Indian musical drums we have a circular drum-head which is loaded and damped in such a manner that all the overtones above the ninth are suppressed and these nine are grouped in such a manner as to give a succession of five tones in harmonic sequence. The vibrations of the drum-head present a striking analogy to the case of a stretched string giving one or the other of its first five harmonics; the drum-head divides up into 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 sections giving the respective harmonics. The third, fourth and fifth harmonics are obtained by superposition of 2, 2 and 3 respectively of the normal modes of vibration. The corresponding superposed forms of vibration are readily obtained and demonstrated by means of sand figures. Numerous figures illustrate the paper. © 1934 Indian Academy of Sciences.