Ah, the glass armon­ica. Is there ever a more pleas­antly haunt­ing sound? For those that are unfa­mil­iar with this weird and won­der­ful instru­ment it is a super-duper, glass-rub-o-matic, Ben Franklin spe­cial. You see, old Benny had the bril­liant idea of automat­ing the whole rub­bing the rim of a wine glass trick by skew­er­ing a bunch of glass bowls and spin­ning the whole thing like a musi­cal rotisserie.

Try play­ing one your­self… vir­tu­ally at least. The Franklin Insti­tute has a fun lit­tle online armon­ica to play around with. But to truly get a sense of what it can do mosey on down to YouTube and just look at any of the dozens of videos of Thomas Bloch work­ing it.

You can hardly ever men­tion the glass armon­ica on the net with­out peo­ple going on about lead. See, the glass armon­inca has gained a rep­u­ta­tion for caus­ing insan­ity and other forms of psy­chic dis­tress. The pop­u­lar expla­na­tion among com­ment­board posters is that lead poi­son­ing is to blame.

There are sev­eral rea­sons why I would dis­count this the­ory. First thing is to look at is the sup­posed vec­tors of lead trans­mis­sion. Two pos­si­ble sources of lead con­t­a­m­i­na­tion on the armon­ica are in the paint and the glass. While paint was orig­i­nally used on the bowls to dis­tin­guish the notes, gold band­ing replaced this prac­tice some years before the armon­ica fell out of fash­ion. Paint was used in roughly the first 30 years of the armonica’s exis­tence, a time when it enjoyed immense pop­u­lar­ity.  Aside from this, the paint (if indeed it were lead paint at all) would be painted on the inside of the bowls as the whole point of the armon­ica is that you’re rub­bing glass, not paint. The other sup­posed vec­tor of lead poi­son­ing, the lead in the crys­tal, is just as unlikely. While it has been shown that lead does leech out of lead glass­ware, the effect is most pro­nounced with acidic liq­uids, and long stor­age peri­ods. The water an armon­ica player uses on their fin­gers is unlikely to leech out a sub­stan­tial amount of lead, and while we all know musi­cians love to party, I doubt many armon­i­cas were con­verted to cham­pagne fountains.

Next we should take a look at the symp­toms of lead poi­son­ing. We must con­cen­trate on the symp­toms that appear in adults, as it is unlikely that there were many child armon­ica play­ers. We also must con­fine our­selves to look­ing at the symp­toms which man­i­fest behav­iorally which are: irri­tabil­ity, sleep­less­ness, ner­vous­ness,  and loss of appetite. Even if all these symp­toms were present in one indi­vid­ual it would hardly seem like insan­ity brought on by the spooky tones of a weird instru­ment.  More­over, these symp­toms would not present them­selves in the audi­ence (hav­ing not been in phys­i­cal con­tact with the armon­ica) who would pre­sum­ably be as equally affected by the strange tones of the armon­ica as the player. Also we must con­sider the imme­di­acy of the symp­toms. The onset of lead poi­son­ing through the cul­mi­na­tion of what lit­tle one might ingest from trace amounts left on one’s fin­gers after play­ing the armon­ica would take many, many years of expo­sure. Because the effect would be so far removed from the cause, I doubt many would actu­ally come to blame the result­ing clus­ter of symp­toms on the armonica.

I sus­pect that, as is typ­i­cal of humans, peo­ple are see­ing causal­ity where none exists. Both in blam­ing the armon­ica for ill effects, and in point­ing the fin­ger at lead poi­son­ing. The tim­bre of the armon­ica was once described as ‘celes­tial’. Just one lis­ten and you’re sure to agree that it pos­sesses an other-worldly sound. This makes it very easy for super­sti­tions to grow around it, and become the tar­get of blame for events that are syn­chro­nous yet oth­er­wise random.

Check out Finkenbeine’s page on the Glass Armon­ica if you want more infor­ma­tion or to pur­chase one.

Tags: Glass Armonica, History, Instruments

This entry was posted on Monday, January 12th, 2009 at 7:43 am and is filed under Everything Else. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.