![]() ![]() From the perspective of the child assigned to the pitch D-sharp (or re sharp, in solfége), we learn the appalling truth: Ré-dièze et Mlle Mi-bémol” (“Mister Ray Sharp and Miss Me Flat”, 1893) a musician outfits an organ with a special register of children’s voices. Jules Verne demonstrated the connection by substituting humans for cats: in his short story “M. But it is front and center in the history of imaginary instruments. ![]() That keyboards facilitate cruelty is a notion hardly evident in the history of realized instruments (a rare hint is found on an eighteenth-century spinet inscribed, “intactum sileo percute dulce cano”: “untouched, I am silent strike me, I sing sweetly”). Both artistic control and heartless treatment are abetted by the keyboard interface, which gives players access to numerous pitches but only at a remove from their sources. The cat piano unearths an uncomfortable connection between music and abuse, between the artistic control of sound and the heartless treatment of sounding bodies. Francis bacon piano for sale license#But the license granted in the space of the imaginary points to illicit aspects of the real. The absurdity of a cat piano has no doubt contributed to its appeal across the centuries. But since it was extremely difficult for man to make a spiral so perfect as nature, it was near impossible to construct the tubo cochleato, and no one in Bonanni’s day used the device. As Bonanni explained, the tubo cochleato would amplify the voice much more than a straight tube the evidence came from nature, from the fact that the ears of hares and other timid animals were formed in the spiral shape. ![]() Francis bacon piano for sale full#Kircher’s student Filippo Bonanni also discussed the device in his book, Gabinetto armonico pieno d’istromenti sonori indicati e spiegati (Musical cabinet full of sounding instruments, shown and explained, 1722), where it appears among musical instruments both of common European use and from other parts of the world. The tubo cochleato, for example, was described by Athanasius Kircher in his treatise on acoustics, Phonurgia nova (1673), as a device for amplifying the voice. But the process can run the other way around as well. We have also means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances.īacon’s sound-houses illustrate one era’s technological imaginary becoming a later one’s reality - the course of things we’d likely expect. We also have divers strange and artificial echoes, reflecting the voice many times, and as it were tossing it, and some that give back the voice louder than it came, some shriller and some deeper yea, some rendering the voice differing in the letters or articulate sound from that they receive. We have certain helps which set to the ear do further the hearing greatly. We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices and notes of beasts and birds. We represent small sounds as great and deep, likewise great sounds extenuate and sharp we make divers tremblings and warblings of sounds, which in their original are entire. Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have, together with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We have harmonies, which you have not, of quarter-sounds and lesser slides of sounds. ![]() We have also sound-houses, where we practice and demonstrate all sounds and their generation. No less than instruments you hold in your hand, imaginary instruments act as interfaces between mind and world, limning the edges of what we may think and do. What’s more, they have not merely shadowed or paralleled musical life they have formed a vital part of it, participating in ways that show the fragility of the distinction between imaginary and real. Yet in their own strange ways, imaginary musical instruments exist. One might suppose that imaginary musical instruments, deprived of physical reality, have no place in the cultural histories and heritages that a museum of musical instruments aims to illuminate and preserve. Though these instruments, due to some measure of impracticality and impossibility, did not take sounding form, they were nonetheless put forth in the various means available to conjure objects in our minds: in writings, drawings, sometimes even in detailed schematics. Missing from such collections, however, is the peculiar class of what we like to call “fictophones”: imaginary musical instruments. ![]()
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