THE STORY OF A NAME
Every age has its instrument.
Stone. Water. Wood. Brass. Electricity. And now a pane of glass. A short history of the instruments whose names end in ‑phone, why ours is called Prismaphone, and why it comes now.
φωνή
phōnē: sound, voice.
Put a word in front of it and it names an instrument: the sound of wood, the sound of stone, the sound of a maker’s name. Prismaphone is the sound of a prism.
LITHOPHONE
lithos, stone
In 1949, in the highlands of Vietnam, eleven slabs of stone came out of the ground that ring when you strike them. Played some three thousand years ago, they may be among the oldest instruments we know.
HYDRAULIS
hydōr, water
In Alexandria, the engineer Ctesibius let water hold the air steady in a row of pipes, and gave them keys. Not yet a ‑phone, but the first keyboard, and the ancestor of every organ.
XYLOPHONE
xylon, wood
In West Africa, the balafon: wooden bars that sing over gourds. The Sosso Bala, kept in a village in Guinea, is said to be eight hundred years old. In the 1860s English gave the idea a Greek name: the sound of wood.
SAXOPHONE
Sax, its maker
In Paris, Adolphe Sax patents an instrument of brass that speaks like a clarinet and carries like a horn. It makes the ending famous.
VIBRAPHONE
vibrare, to tremble
In Indianapolis, Hermann Winterhoff sets small discs turning under metal bars with an electric motor, and the tone begins to shimmer. For the first time, electricity plays along.
ELECTROPHONE
ēlektron, amber
Musicology sorts every instrument by what makes its sound: idiophones, membranophones, chordophones, aerophones. In 1940 Curt Sachs adds a fifth family: electrophones, sound from electricity.
STYLOPHONE
stylus, a pen
A pen on a metal keyboard, small enough for a pocket. Two years later it sings through David Bowie’s Space Oddity.
PRISMAPHONE
prisma, the prism
A pane of glass, played with your thumbs, as the kalimba is. You don’t learn the notes first: it knows the key, the chords and the beat. You lead, it follows.
WHY NOW
The craft used to come first.
For most of history, making something meant learning the craft first. Years of scales before a song. Years of practice before a painting, a film, a program. Most people never had the time, the teacher or the chance, and their ideas stayed ideas.
That is changing. More and more, the tools carry the craft, and what’s left is the part that was always yours: the idea, the feeling, the timing. People who never went to film school make films. People who never learned to code build software.
Now it’s music’s turn. Prismaphone knows the key, the chords and the beat. You don’t learn the notes first. You start with what you feel, and it finds the notes for it.
You’ve always had the music. Now you have the instrument.
WHY PRISM
One beam, every colour.
In 1666 Isaac Newton let a single beam of sunlight through a glass prism. On the wall of his room it opened into colours. He counted seven, as many as the notes of a scale.
Prismaphone does the same with what you play. One move of your thumb goes in, and out come the right note, the chord beneath it and the beat. Its light shows how you play: violet and blue when you’re calm, warming through cyan, mint and gold to orange and red as you play faster.
Move across the page, slowly, then fast.
Stone. Wood. Brass.Electricity. Glass.
Every age gets its instrument. This is ours.
For iPhone
Notes. The age of the Vietnamese lithophone is an estimate; it is kept at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. The Sosso Bala’s age comes from tradition; the oldest written account of a balafon is Ibn Battuta’s, from 1352. Newton described the experiment as made in 1666 and presented it in 1672. The vibraphone’s motor is dated 1921 or 1922; Leedy sold it from 1924.
Sources: Lithophone, Water organ, Balafon, Adolphe Sax, Vibraphone, Electrophones, Stylophone, Newton’s Opticks.