Word: fingerboards
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...noise he made. Eighteen years ago, when he was designing seismographs to measure earthquakes, he decided that there wasn't much difference between a seismograph and a fiddle "except one deals with slow movements and the other with rapid movements." For his scientific cello he mounted a conventional fingerboard and electrified bridge on a heavy wooden frame and stood the whole thing on a metal peg leg. Instead of tones, Dr. Benioff's cello produces electrical impulses which are transmitted to loudspeakers. It has a wider range than a standard cello, but not the deep brown tone...
...Fingerboards and Filters. The emiriton. which produces tones much like those of the violin, cello, bassoon, clarinet and oboe, has several advantages over previous electro-musical instruments (such as the theremin). Because it is played by running one finger up and down a free fingerboard, tones are produced strictly by finesse of touch, not by mechanical means. Because it is a single-voiced instrument that does not play chords, each instrument in the ensemble is a personality, like each instrument in a string quartet, and lends itself to a great variety of color and volume...
Before the performer, in the spot that would be occupied by a piano keyboard, is a cloth-covered fingerboard about three feet long and three inches wide. This is a rheostat. By pressing the finger on it at any given point, the player controls the amount of electricity that goes into the instrument's generator tube. Depending on the amount of current that goes into one of the grids of the tube, the vibration frequency which controls the pitch is changed up & down...