7/7/2023 0 Comments Francis bacon piano for saleWe 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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