This “glass armonica” a banned musical instrument apparently “causes insanity†– I’m not sure about that but it’s gorgeous looking and sounding… (more about it at the Wikipedia too).
11 thoughts on “Crazy glass armonica”
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Crazy glass armonica
Featured prominently in an episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.
http://www.wttw.com/main.taf?erube_fh=wttw&wttw.submit.EpisodeDetail=1&wttw.EpisodeID=57275&wttw.Channel=WTTW
The old glass armonicas were made out of leaded crystal so the people who played them a lot would get lead poisoning. Thus, the craziness.
Made me go insane; but then, what do I know. I’m insane.
Haahahah, thanks guys! You guys rock!
http://oddstrument.com
Wasn’t this invented by Ben Franklin?
I guess if I read the Wikipedia link I’d know that, yes, it was invented by Ben Franklin.
We’ve seen Dean Shostak play this thing every holiday season for the past four or five years. It’s truly a haunting and fascinating performance.
He’s added other glass instruments over the years. He now plays a 100% glass violin on stage as well.
There was a rumor of a glass Cello. But I don’t know how that’s going.
here a link to a virual glass armonica
http://sln.fi.edu/franklin/musician/virtualarmonica.html
I just made a simple one and can already play beautiful songs on it. This is so addictive!! I need to find a good tutorial on how to glue these down properly. You can make much stronger sounds if you hold the glasses firmly..but I like doing chording.
Any ideas about how the various glass “notes” are tuned?
Very early instruments were made of leaded glass, and the insanity was caused by absorption of the lead through the fingers when playing the instrument. Lead is a neurotoxin.