Gong – Circular sheet of cut metal suspended from a ceiling and meant to be struck with a handheld tool or pressed on the surface in order to generate sound.
Double-Walled Gong – A type of gong made by welding together two plates of metal. These sounding sculptures are thus hollow inside.
Single-Plate Gong – A type of gong made from a single plate of solid metal. Single-plate gongs are cut into unique shapes, some geometric and others organic, in order to produce particular sounds.
Mallet – A hammer-shaped tool used to strike gongs. Bertoia made his own mallets, often attaching a baseball to a wooden handle and covering them with cloth or chamois leather. Mallets were also adapted to produce various sounds; spirals of silver inlaid in the mallet’s end would create a sharper sound.
Recordings – The eleven LPs Bertoia published, compiled from recordings of the artist playing his sounding sculptures, sometimes with his brother Oreste and others, in his Barto studio barn.
Singing Bar – A type of sounding sculpture comprised of two metal rods – or bars – of slightly different lengths, minimally altered, and hung from a ceiling by a rope tied to the rods through two drilled holes. The rods rest in an “x” shape, and when hit or swung strike each other and generate sound.
Sonambient – A neologism Bertoia invented that refers to the artistic concept of using sculpture to create an ambient sound environment. Often associated with performances of sounding sculptures Bertoia undertook in his barn studio in Pennsylvania. The artist also released a series of recordings titled Sonambient and participated in a film of the same name made by Jeffrey and Miriam Eger in 1971.
Sounding Sculpture – A distinct type of sculpture that includes tonals, gongs, and singing bars, meant to be struck, moved, or otherwise activated in order to create sound.
Tonal – Sounding sculptures consisting of various arrangements of vertical rods, soldered or welded to a base and loose at the top. Additional pieces of metal are sometimes added to the rod tops to alter or enhance their sound. Tonals are characterized by the type of metal used, the configuration of rods, and top elements.
Angled – Tonal sculptures in which at least some of the rods are placed on the base at an angle rather than vertically.
Bud – Tonals in which the individual rods are topped with small circular or other organic, irregular shapes that resemble botanical buds.
Cattail – Tonals in which the individual rods are topped with additional rod pieces. These tops are larger in diameter, thus resembling the flowers of a cattail plant.
Circular or Semicircular – Tonals in which the rods are arranged in a circular or semicircular shape, rather than a rectangular configuration. Both forms are less common than rectangularly-configured tonals.
Cylinder – Tonals in which the individual rods are topped with additional squat cylinder pieces of rods, often of larger diameter and shorter height than the cattails.
Multigroup – Tonals that include more than one grouping of rods on a single base plate.
Reed – Tonals where no additional element is added to the top of individual rods, resembling a reed plant.