Aeolian harp
Named after Aeolus, the ancient Greek god of the wind, the traditional Aeolian harp is essentially a wooden box including a sounding board, with strings stretched lengthwise across two bridges.
[3] The Aeolian harp – already known in the ancient world – was first described by Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) in his books Musurgia Universalis (1650)[4] and Phonurgia Nova (1673).
The quality of sound depends on many factors, including the lengths, gauges, and types of strings, the character of the wind, and the material of the resonating body.
The unifying characteristic between all Aeolian harps, regardless of appearance, is their source of sound, the strings, and the fact they are played by the wind.
Similar taut wires like non-telescoping radio antennae, ships' anchor lines, and stiff rods also exhibit this phenomenon.
On some Aeolian harps, all the strings are tuned to the same frequency, as the wind will already influence the pitch by yielding different overtones depending on its intensity.
Instead of making a large sound chamber, designers of Aeolian harps approaching seven meters in height use different mechanisms to increase the volume of their instruments.
[4] Aside from famous Aeolian harp monuments, many can be found along isolated expanses of the European coast in countries such as Denmark, Germany, and Sweden, where they are played by strong ocean winds.
Henry David Thoreau also wrote a poem called "Rumors from an Aeolian Harp", which he included in the "Monday" chapter of his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.
These include George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871–72), Thomas Hardy's The Trumpet-Major (1880) and The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955).
[12] More recently, an Aeolian harp was also featured in Ian Fleming's 1964 children's novel Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang to make a cave seem haunted.
In William Heinesen's novel The Lost Musicians (1950), set in Tórshavn, character Kornelius Isaksen takes his three sons to a little church where, in the tower, they sit listening to the "capriciously varying sounds of an Aeolian harp", which leads the boys into a lifelong passion for music.
In 1972, Chuck Hancock and Harry Bee recorded a giant 30-foot-tall (9.1 m) Aeolian harp designed and built by 22-year-old Thomas Ward McCain on a hilltop in Chelsea, Vermont.
[citation needed] The Aeolian harp is especially common in modern music being sampled as a backing track for its eerie, exotic, and unique sound.
On his album Dis (1976), jazz saxophonist Jan Garbarek used as a background sound recordings of an Aeolian harp, designed and built by Sverre Larssen (1916–1983), that was situated at a Norwegian fjord.
It is a sound monument designed by the Italian architect Giuseppe Ferlenga which was inaugurated in November 2015 from the Sports and Cultural Group of Mazzano.
In the Mimbres Valley of New Mexico, there is an Aeolian harp, titled Tempest Song, exceeding seven metres in height.
Tempest Song is similar in appearance to a standard harp with 45 strings tuned to the C minor pentatonic scale and a central bearing originally from a semi-truck.
[3] It was built by Bob Griesing and Bill Neely in June and July 2000, and at the time was mistakenly declared the "World's Largest Aeolian Harp".
[15] An even larger Aeolian harp, measuring eight metres tall, can be found at the Exploratorium, a museum in San Francisco.
[8] In Sydney, Nova Scotia, on Cape Breton is an even larger 18-metre-tall, 10 ton steel Aeolian harp which doubles as the world's largest fiddle.
This Aeolian harp is located a little over 74 metres above sea level, which means it always receives a suitable breeze and that it comes with a panoramic view of South San Francisco and some of the Bay.
