Hers was more like the one on the right. Now what these are are a musical instrument, originating in Africa, variously called a finger piano, thumb piano, sanza, kalimba, or mbira. its played by plucking the tines to make notes. The point is, I wanted one and when it hit me that the instrument was just steel tines sandwiched between three metal rods screwed onto a sound box, I realized I could make one for jewelry! ....maybe.
Now I think its an unusual enough instrument that it could go for science fiction; it's not as weird as a theremin, but good enough especially if its given a radical space age shape. But therein lies a problem. You see, many instruments are made of wood for a reason, it's because wood vibrates and resonates to amplify the plucking of a string according to my glancing through wikipedia. So if I decide to make a thumb piano out of metal what does that do to the acoustics of the instrument. Will it produce no sound? A soft sound? A tinny or metallic sound? It must be a crap sound since I can't find any one silly enough to try making an instrument's sound box out of metal.
The closest I could get to it is was this video of a guy who made a prototype thumb piano for a camp project idea.
The bulk of his sound board is still made of wood, but the top appears to be metal which makes me wonder if it will be possible to make it entirely of metal and still get a sound, perhaps an alien sound? Therefore to test it I am going to follow his example and buy an Altoids tin, some bobby pins, and assemble a quick and dirty one using some scrap metal to tack down the pins. Worse comes to worst I save this idea for when I have to take wood shop!
P.S. 50 years ago today Yuri Gagarin was the first man to go into space! As a further aside Google changed their logo for the event, it looks quite a lot like Russian stamps that commemorate space flight.
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