Last fall, while walking down my upstairs hallway, an idea came into my head, Athena-like (more or less), for a kind of drone instrument: a cylinder with strings running down its length all around, turned by a crank on an axle, and with a curved horsehair bow wrapping around half of it. I envisioned it as fairly large, several feet long and with at least a few dozen strings. It could be a monochord (all strings tuned in unison), or perhaps tuned to a pair of notes a fourth or fifth apart, maybe even a pentatonic scale, and, in any case, with half the strings being bowed simultaneously.
I was very excited by this idea and spent the next few months envisioning ever more precisely how such a thing might be constructed. I began assembling the needed tools, CADing a prototype, and ordering the materials. I'm now at the point where I can begin to build it. Here are some screenshots of the rendered prototype:
What you're looking at: the core of this instrument is an octagonal cylinder about 20 inches long, across the length of which eight strings are stretched. Each side is comprised of what is essentially a one-sided zither: a spruce soundboard, underneath one end of which is a pinblock (unseen in these renderings), into which, in turn, is driven a tuning pin; from the pin, over a small bridge, along the soundboard, and over the slot-like soundhole, runs a wire string, which then anchors to an endblock that also serves for a nut. Eight of these simple zithers are then set next to each other to make the cylinder. The soundboards, although they make the shape of the instrument, are not intended to provide structure. Instead, the pinblock and endblock are themselves anchored to the axle on which the whole unit turns; thus the load of the string tension is intended to be borne by the blocks and the axle, freeing up the soundboards to resonate. (Also, the spruce to be used for the soundboards is a fairly weak wood structurally.) The ends of the axle then rest on Y-shaped supports in a frame, allowing the player to rest the instrument on a surface, turn the crank with one hand, and hold the bow -- the large hoop-like shape -- with the other.
As you can see, this proof-of-concept prototype is much smaller than what I described above, having only eight strings and being about two feet long overall. There are several issues I need to test before investing the time and, especially, materials in a full size version. First, I need to learn how to construct a tubular soundbox such that the soundboard can take the medial (toward the axis) force of the strings, while also putting as much of the longitudinal force of the strings (that created by the string tension) as possible elsewhere (i.e., the blocks and axle); for that matter, I'm unsure of exactly how much total force the structure will have to withstand. Second, I have no idea about how the resonance of a wooden cylindrical shape when stimulated by a bow and string might work (as opposed to when such a shape is struck like a wind chime) and will need to identify nodes and anti-nodes to determine where the bridges can to be placed, their ideal shape, etc., and, indeed, if the thing can sing at all. Third, the mechanics of a hoop-bow are, at this point, entirely imaginal; I am unsure if it can even work. There are other, smaller challenges to work out, as well as unforeseen problems that will certainly arise. I fully expect, too, that scaling up to a, say, four-foot long, 32- or 36-string version will produce new issues, but I'm hoping that this prototype will help me "figure out how to figure out" how to build it.
To the best of my ability to ascertain, this is an entirely novel device. I would not put money on it being so, as humans have been inventing sound making machines perhaps longer than we've had language, but I've not seen anything like it in any of the research I've done on musical instrument building. I think of it as a kind of inside-out hurdy-gurdy: in that instrument, the strings are stationary and a rosined wheel that serves as a kind of endless bow is cranked across them, while in this, the bow is stationary and the strings move across it. I would be unsurprised if no-one had built such a thing, as, honestly, it seems a pretty ridiculous way to build an instrument, but it's my idea and it's interesting to me, even if it is terribly impractical, and so I plunge ahead.
For a name, I chose "vionola" as a reference to both the violin family and the instrument's mechanical nature, recalling the trend in the early 20th century to add "-ola" to a variety of brands and objects (although not exclusively mechanical ones). Also, it harkens back to my first career after music school, rebuilding player pianos, for a kind of nostalgic symmetry. (To be fair, and as I implied above, the instrument has much more in common with a zither than a violin family instrument. Technically, a zither is a stringed instrument the strings of which do not extend beyond the soundboard, while the bow is not relevant to the definition; for example, a bowed psaltery, while played somewhat like a violin, is nonetheless considered a type of zither. That said, while "zithola" might arguably be more correct, I'm going to indulge my violistic bias.)
My plan, beginning in the next week or two, is to post my progress here, showing pix of what I'm doing and relevant excerpts from my CAD. Having now watched countless hours of woodworking, guitar-building, and various instrument-making videos on YouTube as a result of the pandemic, I have a sense of the time and effort that goes into a filmic documentation of one's work and, at this stage anyway, have no interest in making that investment. I'm not even very confident I'll be self-aware enough to remember to take pictures of the project as I proceed, but I'm going to take a swing at it.
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