Quiz | As easy as a Sunday morning: on musical instruments

1, Born on November 6, 1814, Adolphe Sachs was a Belgian-French inventor who had a very unfortunate childhood. As a child he fell three floors on a stone pavement, at age three he drank a bowl of diluted acid, thinking it was milk, was near a gunpowder explosion, fell into a frying pan , almost once asphyxiated, and fell into the river. His neighbors called him the ‘Imp Bhoot’. At the age of 25 he overcame it all to invent a new musical instrument. What invention did he make under his name that ruled jazz?

2, Christian Ludwig Buschmann was a German musical instrument maker who invented an instrument consisting of free metal reeds attached to a block of wood. Notes were produced by allowing air to blow through the reed. It is one of the earliest examples of an instrument that has become one of Europe’s most popular instruments in folk music. What is this musical instrument, whose name means ‘musical chord’?

3, John Compton was the creator of a specific type of wind instrument, which became prevalent in theaters, theaters, and churches in the early 1900s. Some of them are still working on regular basis. What are these devices, one of which is housed in a Finchley in two chambers, each about 1,400 cubic feet and more than 200 pistons?

4, Bartolomeo Cristofori began in 1680 as an apprentice to the violin maker Niccol Amati. At the age of 33 he was recruited by Prince Ferdinando de Medici to create new musical instruments. It was then that he invented something called the ‘arpisembalo’, a ‘new invention that produces soft and loud sounds with two sets of strings at the same pitch’. How well do we know this invention’?

5, John Dopiera’s father produced violins in Slovakia in 1908. After World War I, John moved to California where he started a banjo repair shop. He and his brothers were then asked by Georges Beauchamp to improvise on the Spanish guitar to ensure that it could be heard on an orchestra. He successfully invented something in 1932 which he sold under the name ‘Dobro’. How did he improve the Spanish guitar?

6, Roger Lynn is an American inventor who in 1980 developed and invented an electronic machine that revolutionized the way music was made. He was single-handedly responsible for the distinctive sound of ’80s music. Known as the LM-1, it used real samples of a real instrument played by Art Wood. It can be programmed by anyone with a basic knowledge of music and it can result in a flurry of new music. What did Linen make?

7, Richard Pokrich was an Irish musician who invented an instrument called the ‘angelic organ’ in 1741. It is played by rubbing different parts of the instrument with a moist finger. What item, commonly found in European homes, is used to make the ‘tuned’ parts of this instrument, now known as the ‘glass harp’?

8, Lester William Polfuss was an American blues guitarist who is credited with many recording inventions such as overdubbing, tape delay, and multi-track recording. In 1940, experimenting with his woodworking shop, he built a tool called ‘The Log’, a 4×4 piece of wood with a bridge, neck, strings and hand-wound pickups. What did he invent, and how well do we know his name?

9, Leon Theremin invented an electronic musical instrument he called the ‘Etherphone’ in 1928. It consists of two metal antennas, which sense the relative position of the player’s hands and control the oscillator for frequency with one hand, and volume with the other. Its eerie sounds have inspired it to be used in movie soundtracks for horror or extra-terrestrial scenes. What is unique about playing this instrument?

10, Walther Nernst was a German chemist whose work on the third law of thermodynamics won the 1920 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 1930, he invented the ‘Neo-Beckstein-Flugel’, an electric piano that used electromagnetic pickups to produce an electronically modulated and amplified sound, just like an electric guitar. A friend helped him develop it. Who was this dude who won the Nobel Prize in Physics a year later?