Suling Sunda

A suling or Seruling is an Indonesian flute made out of bamboo. It is used in gamelan ensembles.

Depending on the regional genre, a suling can be tuned into different scales. Sulings can be found in the following regions:

    * Sunda (West Java), Indonesia

    * Java (Central Java), Indonesia

    * Bali, Indonesia (bali as in balinese)

    * Mindanao, Philippines

    * Sulu, Philippines

Sulings are made mainly of 'tamiang' bamboo (Schizostachyum blumei, Nees), a long tube bamboo with a which has very thin surface. The head of suling, near a small hole, is circled with a thin band made of rattan or rotan to produce air vibration.

There are two factors that affect a fine suling's tone:

   1. Fingering position.

   2. Speed of the airflow blown by the mouth.

The fingering position changes the wavelength of sound resonance inside the suling's body. Depending on the distance of nearest hole to the suling's head, different notes can be produced. The airflow speed also can modify the tone's frequency. A note with twice frequency can be produced mostly by blowing the air into suling's head's hole with twice speed.

In the Sundanese region, a suling is used as

    * one of the main instruments in kacapi suling

    * accompanying instrument in Gamelan Degung, Tembang Sunda

Sulings can have either 4 holes or 6 holes. The 6-holed Sundanese suling can play at least three different scales.

    * Pelog Degung: da mi na ti la da [1 2 3 4 5 1],

      nearly corresponds to do si sol fa mi do [1' 7 5 4 3 1] in the Western diatonic scale.

    * Madenda or Sorog: da mi na ti la da [1 2 3 4 5 1],

      nearly similar to fa mi do si la fa [4’ 3’ 1’ 7 6 4] in the Western diatonic scale.

    * Salendro: da mi na ti la da [1 2 3 4 5 1],

      nearly similar to re do la sol fa re [2’ 1’ 6 5 4 2] in the Western diatonic scale.

    * Mandalungan: a rarely used scale

The Maguindanaon suling is the smallest bamboo flute of the Maguindanaon and the only one classified as a ring-flute (the other two bamboo flutes of the Maguindanaon, the tumpong and the palendag are both lip-valley flutes). Air is passed through the suling via a blowing hole found at the bottom of the instrument and pitch is controlled via five finger holes on the top and one finger hole located on the bottom. Traditionally only the palendag was commonly played but because of the difficult nature of playing the palendag, both the tumpong and the suling have come to replace the palendag as the Maguindanaon’s most common aerophones

Sumber : Wikipedia