Gamelan Listrik: A Low-cost Solution to Introduce Javanese Gamelan to the Young Generation

: This paper offers a new design of electric musical instrument that called Gamelan Listrik. Gamelan Listrik is designed to be a low-cost instrument that can be used to play Javanese traditional music ensemble. A set of traditional gamelan instrument is very expensive. This makes only a few elementary schools own gamelan instrument and causes only a few numbers of students who know the instrument or even able to play it. Gamelan Listrik is proposed to be the solution of this matter. Using the gamelan Listrik, an elementary school can develop a gamelan class where the students can learn basic playing of the instrument and gain experiences. The most important thing is the students will have opportunity to develop their motivation in their early age. Experiments showed that Gamelan Listrik performed satisfactorily. It has small latency and the sound volume can be controlled by varying the mallet hitting/striking force to mimic the real gamelan playing. The cost of gamelan listrik is about 1/10 from the cheapest low quality of real gamelan made of iron, or about 1/100 from good quality made of bronze.