Sunrise Drum

The Sunrise Drum is a Stenza drum which has been shaped specifically to allow it to play a form of chord known as a "union".

A Special Note About The Union

In music theory, a comma is a slight difference between a note in a scale derived by one tuning method, and that same note derived by another. Playing the two notes together creates a sound humans consider to be unpleasant (and indeed, various methods of getting around the comma have also created unpleasant sounds). However, when the Stenza first discovered such discrepancies, they found that when certain pairs of allegedly identical sounds were played together, they evoked a sense of religious significance in listeners. These are called "unions", and have been incorporated into pieces of music about the gods, played typically around First Sunrise (which is why the drum designed to play them is called a Sunrise Drum).

Manufacturing process

The Sunrise Drum is constructed as two separate drums attached together at one base with a hard, sound dulling material, creating an hourglass-like silhouette. Each chamber of the drum is a slightly different size, facilitating the construction of the union within Stenza music, and a Sunrise Drum can come in a variety of sizes because of the variety of unions available to the Stenza.
As with other drums, each chamber is constructed from the rib bones of animals killed for food and materials, but can vary in size from the smaller rib bones of fowl such as Kʉrdeneχ to the rib bones of the Basket Horns. Because the construction of the Sunrise Drum is so meticulous, however, the bones are often sanded or chopped into equal lengths for each chamber (as determined by mathematics for the type of union the drum is meant to play). The hides which finish the drum are traditional for drum construction.

Item type

Musical Instrument

Manufacturer

The Nine Systems

Owning Organization

The Nine Systems