New Instrument

Long have instrument makers striven to achieve fine tone-divisions, only to be hampered at each turn by man's clumsiness. The possibilities of the violin, for example, are limited to quarter-tones due to the breadth of man's finger.

Last week two Massachusetts Institute of Technology professors, Arthur Cobb Hardy and Sherwood F. Brown, announced a new instrument which takes the burden of precision off man, puts it on electrical apparatus. No strings, no vibrating air columns are in their invention, which may best be compared to the reproduction apparatus for Movietone talking pictures.

Sound tracks such as now border motion picture films, are imposed on a revolving glass disc. A series of shutters, connected with a keyboard, covers the maze of tracks. When a key is depressed its shutter opens, allows a beam of light to pass through the disc, shine on a photoelectric cell. The light is transformed into an electric impulse, the impulse into sound. Working on this purely electrical principle the fineness of tone division becomes limited only by the ability of the human ear to perceive.

Although this is only a new application of an old idea it opens startling new music fields. By changing the glass disc the instrument may be made to emulate any known string or wind instrument. Thus, it is possible to foresee a symphony orchestra made up of a hundred Hardy & Brown devices keyed to simulate violins, piccolo-flutes, oboes. French horns.

The disc on the M. I. T. instrument was keyed to a three-octave board, reproduced deep pipe organ notes. Unlike Leon Sergeievitch Theremin's "ether music" box (TIME, Sept. 30), Hardy & Brown's development does not slide from one note to another, slurring the intervening ones.

Prior to now the finest tone-division ever achieved was on the arpacitera, a zither-like instrument with a one-octave range which produced sixteenth tones. It was played with the Philadelphia Orchestra three years ago by Beatrice Weller. Specially constructed French horns have also achieved sixteenth tones.

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