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Drone in Music: The Drone Tone
Sometimes a musician strums or plucks a single note rhythmically (a “rhythmic drone”) to sustain the drone tone effect and also provide rhythmic accompaniment.
While normally instrumental, some drone traditions in music feature vocalists singing drone syllables.
Drone tones are found in many of the world’s musical cultures:
- Indian classical music
- Jew’s harp (jaw harp) playing
- Fiddle traditions such as Celtic, eastern European, and Appalachian
- Australian aboriginal didgeridoo playing
Usually the drone tone is the tonic note—though not necessarily in the Western diatonic tonal music tradition. Sometimes a single drone tone is not the tonic.
When the drone is the tonic note, it serves the same function as the tonic note in Western diatonic harmony. It acts as the musical centre of gravity, an important unifying role when employed with scales other than diatonic major or minor scales (or close relatives such as pentatonic scales).
A drone sound makes it possible to play modal melodies while providing harmony, because every melodic note automatically harmonizes with the drone, except melodic notes identical to the drone. Some are close harmonies (related by simple frequency ratios), others are dissonant harmonies.