Instruments, Invented And Improved
Among 19th-century Canadian inventors were James P. Clarke (ca 1807-77), said to have built an organ with glass tubes which he claimed afforded greater possibilities for tonal variations, and Roch Lyonnais (1849-1921), who experimented with instruments between 1865 and 1880. Salluste Duval (ca 1857-1917), a chemist, medical doctor, and organist, invented an adjustable organ pedal which began to be used in Casavant organs in 1884. In 1892 the Casavants built their first electro-pneumatic organs. One of these was installed in the Ottawa Basilica and another in the Parish Church of Notre-Dame-du-Rosaire at St-Hyacinthe, Que. Morse Robb of Belleville, Ont, invented an electronic 'wave organ' in 1927, several years before such builders as Hammond produced similar instruments. During the mid-1930s, Oswald Michaud, a piano technician and acoustics specialist in Montreal, invented and patented an electric piano which he called the Sonobel. In place of a sounding board the Sonobel had near the strings electro-magnets which passed vibrations through an amplifier to a loudspeaker. Though well received the Sonobel was overshadowed by the electronic organ. The two Sonobel prototypes were retained by Michaud's granddaughter. A more recent keyboard invention is the Shaw Concept Organ. Built by Neil Shaw of Burlington, Ont, it features 54 stops and 285 audio channels. Valued at over $100,000, it has been heard in concert and has been rented out on occasion. Also of interest is the monophonic (that is, capable of producing only one note at a time) electronic 'sackbut' invented by the noted physicist Hugh Le Caine in 1945. Le Caine later invented an instrument which he called the Pauliphone and which was capable of playing two or more notes at once. Le Caine's biographer, Gayle Young, designed and built two instruments that exemplify her interest in tuning and pitch. The first, a percussion instrument with 61 steel tubes, each tuned to 23 pitches per octave, is called the columbine and was developed in 1977. The second, the amaranth, was developed in 1980 and is a 24-stringed instrument with a moveable bridge that provides a flexible tuning system.
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InstrumentsRichard Armin has won international recognition and awards for the RAAD family of string instruments (which are built of spruce wood) that he has developed. They use a patented technology to amplify the instruments' sound electronically. They have been used in schools, universities, for recordings, in concert, and in experimental research at MIT. US composer Tod Machover used a RAAD instrument in his Begin Again Again... for hypercello, which Yo-Yo Ma performed at Tanglewood in 1991. RAAD Instruments Inc. was incorporated in Toronto in 1983.
A Toronto aerospace engineer, Leonard John, an expert on lightweight composite materials, had built and patented by 1988 three prototype graphite violins. The properties of graphite ensure precise replicability, therefore providing a consistent acoustic response from instruments that are less costly to manufacture.
Philippe Ménard developed and introduced in 1986 the Synchoros, an instrument that consists of eight lamps connected to a microcomputer. Sound is produced by the movement of hands under the lamps. In the 1980s Nil Parent developed and refined his additive synthesizer, called the '16 ' to make, as he said '...a perfect junction between synthesis and analysis..'. (CanComp, 201, May-Jun 1985).