Sonokinetic Bowls

An Overview

Known as the meditative musical sound of tranquility, the bowls we recorded for this instrument have a magical quality and emit pure frequencies.

These quartz crystal glass bowls give off such a lush and dreamy tone that we had a hard time tearing ourselves away from the recording. We sampled 4 bowls of varying sizes from 20cm to 25cm diameter, struck with a glass mallet with a rubber finish.

We also rubbed the mallet around the edge of the bowls to make them “sing” a light and airy musical note. The samples here have such a gorgeous and complex tone that the AMS microphone system we used for recording gives a completely different character for each of the different mic positions.

Give them a try and see what you think of these spiritual sounds.

AMS

We recorded this collection with our new Aligned Microphone Setup, a bespoke and standardised microphone array we shorten to “AMS”.

The specially designed recording space is unique to Sonokinetic libraries. It has very low wall, ground and ceiling reflections and we’ve taken advantage of that by constructing a new design of microphone rig and setting up an array of 10 mics to capture instruments in precise detail.

These include cardioid, condenser and ribbon microphones. There’s also a binaural head in the centre of the array, which is perfect for those mixing surround and simulated 3D sound scores or producing audio for immersive video games.