American Gamelan Institute for both new and traditional gamelan music, scholarly writings on gamelan, as well as audio and video recordings. Its founder and director is the composer and gamelan musician Jody Diamond. The organization's scope includes gamelan music as practiced in Indonesia as well as around the world. The journal Balungan was started in 1984 to encourage a dialog between artists and scholars involved in gamelan. Current and back issues of "Balungan" are on line, and many libraries have subscriptions. The sixteenth issue was printed in December 2010. The Institute also has a podcast, called "Gongcast" and hosts directories of gamelan groups
Gamelan Bali, remarked, "Deviations in what is considered the same scale are so large that one might with reason state that there are as many scales as there are gamelans." This view is contested, however, by some teachers of gamelan, and there have been efforts to combine multiple ensembles and tuning structures into one gamelan to ease transportation at festival time. One such ensemble is gamelan "Manikasanti", which can play the repertoire of many different ensembles. Balinese gamelan instruments are built in pairs that are tuned slightly apart to produce interference beats, ideally at a consistent speed for all pairs of