Stone har-mon′i-con.
A musical instrument consisting of a number of bars or slabs of stone, supported on strips, bundles of straw, or what not, and played like the dulcimer. See page 760; see also Lapideon, pages 1253, 1254. |
| Tulloch's stone-grinding machine. |
Among the ancient musical instruments of the Chinese is the pien king, which is an assortment of sixteen stones arranged on strings in two series of eight each, one above the other, and each giving out, when struck successively, a system of sounds employed by the ancient Chinese in their music. The size and shape of these stones have been very carefully determined by them after a minute analysis of the sounds peculiar to each one. In order to render the sound graver, the thickness of the stone is diminished to the right amount, and to render it more acute, something is cut off from the length. The stones thus arranged remind one in effect of a series of steel bars, as exhibited in acoustic apparatus to illustrate the fact that vibrations above a certain pitch are inaudible to the human ear. Frequent endeavors have been made to decide what kind of stones are employed in the fabrication of the pien king, since they were customarily paid as tribute-money more than two thousand years before Christ by certain provinces of China. Certain authors have thought that they recognized in them a kind of black marble, and the editor of the works of Father Amiote asserts that the king or musical stone constructed in France with the black marble of Flanders was quite as sonorous as those of China. Lately a discovery was made at Kendal, in England, of some musical stones, which, when struck with a piece of iron or another stone, gave out sounds of very different pitch, and with eight of which it would be possible to attain a very distinct octave. See also Xylophone; Sticcato.
