Oct 20 - Making a Chinese Gong

I got the materials for making my Chinese Gong at the dollar store, and the total came to around $8. This cost could easily be cut down by having students bring in their own pie tins, their own yarn, and their own old used picture frames from home. The mallets could easily be made from old kitchen utensils and old rags, also brought from home. This would also make each gong unique because no one would have the exact same size/shape of gong and mallet, and therefore the sound would be different as well.

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Chinese Gong (Chau Gong)

Materials: circular pie tin, string, square picture frame wider than pie tin, wooden spoon, cloth, paints or markers

Instructions:
• Pierce a hole at 10 and 2 on pie tin
• Tie strings from hole to top corners of picture frame
• Wrap cloth around wooden spoon to form mallet & tie with string
• Decorate picture frame & pie tin with Chinese symbols and art

Difficulty: Medium
Timeframe: Short
To play: Softly strike gong with mallet to produce a resonating percussion sound.


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This project was fun for me. I used red yarn, a black photo frame, and an aluminum malleable pie tin that i cut into a circular shape and rounded the edges as to not cut myself. I punched holes at "10" and "2" position on the round pie tin, and attached the red yarn to these holes. I then attached the yarn to the corners of the photoframe so the pie tin hangs nicely between the photoframe without touching the edges. For a decorative touch, I wove red yarn around the edges of each corner of the photoframe.

The mallet was made from a wooden spoon covered in cloth, and tied on securely with the same red yarn in a bow. On the spoon I painted chinese symbols that I felt were meaninful to me: I chose truth, happiness, and forgiveness down one half of my mallet, and moon, love, and stars down the other half. If doing this with a class, I would let students choose which symbols carried meaning for them and they could draw these on their gongs or mallets as well.

To further integrate this project into other disciplines, the class could do a study of Chinese culture. We could have a chinese guest speaker come in and help to teach us about how to write Chinese symbols and to teach us about chinese culture. We might even have a student in the class of chinese heritage that could help present their culture. The class could also reseach uses for gongs, Chinese New Year, and could listen to different Chinese music. Alternatively, Japanese culture could be studied, as Japanese also use gongs in their culture. Further researches on Samurai warriors and kimonos could also be done.