A green pavilion looking onto a temple courtyard at dusk. Two large taiko drums, a stone lantern, a plum branch in the foreground. The ceremony begins with single hits and builds — rolls of taiko, gong washes, the bell — and then settles back to single hits and silence. Ten minutes.
ten minutes · headphones recommended · no buttons after this
00:00of10:00approach
The ceremony
Taiko drumming is built on contrast: long silences punctuated by single decisive strikes, with bursts of rolling intensity that build and resolve. This page is shaped like a small ceremony in ten parts — approach, settle, offering, gathering, ascent, peak, descent, release, fade, leave. Hits per slot stay low for most of the arc and only briefly climb at the peak.
Five synth voices: big taiko (80→40 Hz sine drop + filtered noise body, 0.6 s decay), small taiko (140→80 Hz, 0.4 s), wood block (800 Hz square pulse, 25 ms), gong (band-passed noise + sub partials, 5 s decay), bell (six sine partials, longest decay 4 s). Tempo is slow — 44 BPM — and most slots stay silent.
The peak section is where the rolls happen: brief eighth-note bursts on the big taiko. The gong fires once at the peak and once on the release, separated by a long held silence.
Sister surfaces: /drum-garden (a small kit in a zen garden) · /drum-rain (a storm of drum hits on a tile floor). Together they cover the meditative-drum register from three angles — quiet kit, weather, ceremony.
