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Leonardo da Vinci, in between doing stuff like painting the best-known piece of art in the world, apparently had time to sketch up a quick blueprint for an instrument: the "viola organista," a piano-violin hybrid that he never built. It looks just like a piano, and plays like one, too, but instead of the hammers that connect to strings and play notes, cranks wrapped with horse-hair like violin bows rub the strings. The resulting sound is familiar but strange, something like a church organ that's just a little on the tipsy side.
Polish concert pianist Slawomir Zubrzycki built the instrument from da Vinci's original plans, and recently unveiled it to a live audience at Poland's Academy of Music,
Polish concert pianist Slawomir Zubrzycki built the instrument from da Vinci's original plans, and recently unveiled it to a live audience at Poland's Academy of Music,
Leonardo's original idea, as preserved in his notebooks of 1488–1489 and in the drawings in the Codex Atlanticus, was to use one or more wheels, continuously rotating, each of which pulled a looping bow, rather like a fanbelt in an automobile engine, and perpendicular to the instrument's strings. The strings would be pushed downward into the bow by the action of the keys, causing the moving bow to sound the pitch of the string. In one design, the strings were fretted with tangents, so that there were more keys than strings (several notes, for example C and C#, would all be played on one string). In another design, each note had its own string.
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