Naming and terminology
FUN-09What is the difference between a handpan, a Hang and a “hang drum”?#
beginner
Short answer. The Hang is one specific instrument, made only by PANArt in Bern between 2001 and 2013. A handpan is any instrument of that broad type, from any of the hundreds of makers. “Hang drum” is a mistake that combines a trademark that does not belong to the instrument you are describing with a word its inventors reject.Take them in order.
Hang. A registered trademark and the property of PANArt Hang Manufacturing Ltd. It refers to the instrument Felix Rohner and Sabina Schärer introduced at the Frankfurt Musikmesse in 2001 and stopped making in December 2013. Roughly speaking, if it did not come out of that workshop in that period, it is not a Hang. Calling a modern instrument a Hang is like calling every vacuum cleaner a Hoover, except that here the maker is still active and still objects.
Handpan. The generic name for the whole class: two hammered half shells, a central dome, a ring of tuned tone fields, a hole in the underside, played with the hands. It covers the Hang historically, though PANArt themselves have never used the word for their instruments, and it covers everything else built since 2007.
Hang drum. This is the phrase most people search for, because it is what the early viral videos were labelled. It is wrong on both halves. “Hang” is a specific brand, so applying it to a Saraz or an Ayasa is simply inaccurate. “Drum” is a category error, since the instrument is an idiophone with no membrane, and PANArt have explicitly discouraged the term as a misnomer.
Why it annoys people is worth understanding, because the irritation is not pure pedantry. Makers spend years developing an instrument and then watch it described using a competitor’s trademark. Players who have absorbed the history feel it erases the difference between an original Hang and a modern instrument. And PANArt, who have fought a long series of legal actions over their design, hear it as the erosion of a name they built.
None of that means you should feel bad for having said it. Almost everyone arrives at the instrument through that phrase. You just stop using it once you know.
FUN-10Where did the word “handpan” come from?#
beginner
Short answer. It was coined around 2007 by Kyle Cox of Pantheon Steel in the United States, as a way of describing his new instrument without using PANArt’s trademarked name “Hang”. It first appeared publicly on the Pantheon Steel website and became the generic term within a few years.The circumstances are documented on handpan-timeline.org and repeated consistently across the community’s own histories. Pantheon Steel, founded by Cox in 2005 and joined by Jim Dusin in 2006, was developing what would become the Halo, the instrument they first released in 2009. Everyone at the time described such instruments by reference to the Hang, because there was no other word. PANArt objected to their trademark being used to market other builders’ instruments and asked for its removal from other websites.
Cox’s solution was to build a name out of the instrument’s actual lineage rather than out of PANArt’s brand. “Pan” points back to the Trinidadian steelpan, which is the genuine ancestor and which both Rohner and Cox came from. “Hand” points at the defining difference: it is played with the hands, not with mallets. The compound is descriptive, generic and, crucially, belonged to nobody.
It caught on fast, for the practical reason that a growing number of builders needed a word they were legally safe using. By the early 2010s it was the default term in English across forums, retailers and the emerging festival circuit.
Two footnotes are worth keeping straight. First, PANArt have never adopted the word for their own instruments and do not regard the Hang as a handpan; they describe their work as sound sculpture made from their own Pang material and consider the connection to Trinidadian pan to have been left behind. So “handpan” is genuinely a term from the second generation of makers, not a rebranding of the first. Second, the term was intended as a mark of respect toward the steelpan tradition rather than a distancing from it, which is why “pan” is in there at all.
Pantheon Steel itself closed in July 2025, twenty years after it was founded. The word outlived the company that made it up.
FUN-11Why does PANArt object to the word “drum”?#
intermediate
Short answer. Partly because it is technically wrong, since the instrument has no membrane and is an idiophone, and partly because PANArt regard the Hang not as a percussion instrument at all but as a sound sculpture with its own playing culture, which the word “drum” invites people to hit.The technical objection first. In the Hornbostel Sachs system a drum is a membranophone, sounding through a stretched skin. The Hang sounds through the vibration of its own steel body and the air column inside it, which makes it an idiophone, alongside bells, gongs and the steelpan. Wikipedia records plainly that the inventors “consider this a misnomer” and have discouraged the phrase “hang drum”.
The deeper objection is philosophical, and it is the one that actually drives PANArt’s position. Rohner and Schärer have consistently framed their work as sculpture rather than product. Their instruments are made from a material they developed and named, Pang, and they describe the results as sound sculptures rather than as drums or even as musical instruments in the conventional commercial sense. Within that framing, “drum” implies a percussion instrument to be struck with force, which is exactly the behaviour that damages a hammered steel shell and detunes it. The word teaches the wrong technique.
There is a third strand that is easy to miss. PANArt spent the 1980s and early 1990s inside the Trinidadian steelpan tradition, an instrument that has itself been persistently trivialised in Europe as the “steel drum”. Rohner and Schärer are precise about naming in a way that reads, in that context, as inherited from a community that got tired of being called a drum band.
You do not have to agree with all of this to respect it. The practical upshot is simple: with PANArt, and with most established makers, the instrument is a handpan, a Hang, or a sound sculpture. It is not a drum, and it is not played like one.
FUN-12What other names does the instrument go by?#
beginner
Short answer. Besides handpan and Hang you will meet pantam, which is standard in Israel and increasingly used elsewhere, “sound sculpture”, which is PANArt’s own preferred framing, and a long tail of individual model names such as Halo, Spacedrum, Gubal and Saraz that belong to specific makers.Pantam. A portmanteau of steel pan and gha·tam, the South Indian clay pot drum. It appears to have originated with an Israeli distributor of PANArt Hangs, and it was revived and popularised around 2014 when Victor Levinson of SPB adopted it for his instruments. Israel has one of the densest handpan scenes in the world, and pantam is simply the ordinary word there. It has since spread into wider use as a neutral alternative to handpan. If someone says pantam, they mean the same object you mean.
Sound sculpture. PANArt’s own term, used for the Hang and for the whole Pang family that followed it. It signals that they consider the work closer to sculpture than to instrument manufacture. Some other makers have adopted the phrase, and several European retailers use it as a category heading.
Model names. These are brands, not instrument types, and they get misused constantly. Halo is Pantheon Steel’s instrument. Spacedrum is Metal Sounds’. Gubal, Hang Gudu and Hang Urgu are PANArt’s later instruments and are genuinely different objects, not just renamed Hangs. Saraz, Ayasa, Nova Meshtel and the rest are makers’ names. Treating any of them as the generic term will confuse people in the same way “hang drum” does.
Names to avoid. “Steel drum” means the Trinidadian steelpan and nothing else. “UFO drum”, “alien drum” and similar appear on marketplace listings, and are a reasonably reliable indicator that the seller does not know or care much about the instrument.
Regional variation is normal and none of this is policed. Handpan is the safe default in English, pantam in Hebrew.
See also: FUN-14
FUN-13Is “handpan” trademarked?#
intermediate
Short answer. No. “Handpan” was deliberately coined as a generic term and functions as one; anyone may use it. “Hang” is a registered trademark belonging to PANArt. Separately, and much more consequentially, PANArt hold copyright in the Hang’s design, which Swiss courts have repeatedly upheld.The trademark position is the simple part. Kyle Cox invented “handpan” in about 2007 precisely so that builders would have a word that was not owned by anybody, and that is how it has been used ever since. PANArt have never claimed it and do not apply it to their own work. You can use it in a company name, on a website and in a product listing without exposure.
“Hang” is different. It is registered and enforced, and PANArt have pursued its misuse. Selling an instrument you did not make in Bern as a “Hang”, or naming your workshop something built on that word, is asking for a letter.
The genuinely important dispute is not about names at all. From 2020 PANArt began asserting that the Hang is a protected work of applied art under Swiss copyright, on the grounds that its lens shaped body, central dome, circular arrangement of tone fields and central underside opening are creative choices rather than purely functional ones. A coalition of roughly twenty five makers and retailers formed as Handpan Community United to contest this. The Bern Higher Court ruled in PANArt’s favour on 2 July 2024, and the Swiss Federal Supreme Court dismissed HCU’s appeal on 27 February 2025. In a further decision dated 16 June 2026 the Bern Commercial Court assessed around 250 submitted designs and found the large majority infringing, with substantial costs awarded against the HCU parties. Reporting at the time noted the decision was subject to appeal.
This is a live situation and any summary of it dates quickly. Two practical points hold regardless. First, the legal exposure attaches to the shape of the instrument, not to the word on the label, so renaming solves nothing. Second, designs that depart from the protected features, for example a concave rather than domed centre note, or a non circular tone field layout, were treated as outside the protected scope. Anyone building commercially should take actual legal advice rather than a knowledge base article.
See also: FUN-10, Business and legal
FUN-14What should I call it when I am talking to a maker?#
beginner
Short answer. Say “handpan”. It is accurate, generic, legally uncomplicated and understood everywhere. Use the maker’s own model name if you know it, and say “Hang” only if you are genuinely talking about a PANArt instrument.A few refinements make conversations go better.
With most makers, handpan is exactly right, and using the specific model name is better still. Asking about “your D Kurd nine” rather than “your hang drum” instantly signals that you have done some reading, which tends to get you a more detailed answer and, on a waiting list, a more human one.
With PANArt, neither handpan nor drum is appropriate. They make Hang, Gubal, Hang Gudu, Hang Urgu and other Pang instruments, and they describe them as sound sculptures. Use the specific name of the instrument, or “sound sculpture”.
In Israel, or with Israeli makers and players, pantam is normal and carries no baggage at all.
In writing for a general audience, it is worth spelling the situation out once. Something like “a handpan, often mistakenly called a hang drum” does the job, gets found by search, and does not repeat the error.
One thing not to do is correct other people aggressively. The “hang drum” correction has become a small in joke and a slightly tiresome one, because the phrase is how nearly everyone finds the instrument in the first place. Someone who says it is not being disrespectful, they are quoting a YouTube title from 2009. If it comes up, the graceful version is to mention the distinction once, lightly, and move on.
If you are unsure what a particular maker prefers, their own website settles it in ten seconds. Most state it explicitly, and using their language back to them is simple courtesy.