Plastic Phonograph Records Are Decorated in Color

Appropriate color pictures adorn both sides of new plastic phonograph records, made-by Vogue Recording Co., Inc., of Detroit, that not only outlast ordinary shellac records but may be put up in the game room or children’s room as decorations. A noiseless, super-high-fidelity plastic surface on an aluminum core prevents them from breaking or warping and gives true tone without needle scratch. .

I’d like to see the reverse. You could put two records on a tape deck and play in stereo!

Add a Tape Recorder to Your Phono

• With the Gramdeck you can turn your phono into a tape recorder—or back into a phono— within a few seconds. The Gramdeck just slips onto the turntable as easily as a record; the turntable drives the tape spools and the phono loudspeakers provide sound reproduction. A pre-amp/control unit which uses transistors and printed circuits and which is installed permanently on the phono in a few seconds, is part of the kit.
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Sugar Violin Plays Music

CONSTRUCTED entirely of sugar by Adolph Hubner, a San Francisco confectioner and sculptor, the novel violin shown above produces excellent music. The instrument was first modeled in cardboard, and finally modeled in sugar with gum tragacanth. A number of famous- violinists have pronounced the instrument excellent in tone.

LOOK AND LISTEN

By JOHN FREE

Voice-controlled hi-fi

At a recent Toshiba press conference I noticed a stack of mini-hi-fi components [PS, Jan.] with a microphone attached. But the mike, I learned, wasn’t plugged in to record music. Instead, it lets you store 15 verbal commands in a microcomputer memory. After that, the hi-fi system responds only to your voice, enabling you to perform 19 functions—operating a cassette deck orally, controlling volume, or selecting tuner channels, for example.
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SEX AND THE BEATLES

The Beatles and their admirers have aroused widespread interest and attention. Fifty million dollars worth of goods bear their name as this article is written. These include wild Beatle wigs, Beatle sweaters, Beatle shirts, Beatle hats, Beatle buttons, etc., etc.

To most adults, the ear-piercing sounds, the jungle screams, and the strange body movements of teen-age Beatle fans are the hardest part of the Beatle-mania burden.
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Reminds me of Hurra Torpedo.

Musicians Present Beethoven in Dishpan Symphony

CLASSIC musicians yielded to the influence of Tin Pan Alley in a novel concert recently staged by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to celebrate the raising of a deficit fund.

Under the direction of Dr. Frederick Stock, leader of the orchestra, all of the members of the percussion section were equipped with pots, pans and other miscellaneous kitchen utensils in preparation for the playing of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 8. Much time was expended in testing the various makeshift instruments to secure the proper tone quality during rehearsal periods.

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Huge Organ Has Six Thousand Throats

Thirty Thousand Miles of Wire Form Nerves of Instrument for Which Fifteen Electric Motors Supply Power AS you listen to the majestic tones of a great pipe organ mere mechanical things seem far away, but behind that proscenium arch is an electrical and pneumatic system of intriguing complexity. Read the rest of this entry »

Phonograph Plays Paper Strips

ONE strip of paper will carry an evening’s entertainment under the new system developed by an Austrian company, under the title of the “Selenophon Piccolo,” by which the “sound tracks,” such as the standard moving-picture sound film carries, are printed in black and white on an inexpensive strip of paper. A thousand feet of this runs twenty minutes; the output of the photo-cell which scans it being amplified in the same manner as the output of the magnetic pickup used with an audio amplifier in phono-radio combinations. A single strip may carry as many as eight sound tracks, on each side. Read the rest of this entry »

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electronic’s strangest music maker

Music From Nowhere

By James Joseph

The theremin—is it “electronics gone haywire?’1 Picking music from air isn’t as easy as it looks.

MAYBE you were among the hundreds of TV skeptics who, doubting their own eyes, recently flooded a network’s switchboard with angry complaints about what appeared to be a man coaxing music out of thin air.
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The Old Songs are the Best Songs

The world’s great music is on Victor Red Seal Records

Let us pause a moment, Gentlemen, and welcome the past. Let us lay aside our invoices and debentures, our politics and our coal-bills. . . . For tonight an old familiar company is with us. . . . Nelly Bly is here, and Old Black Joe . . . Uncle Ned, My Old Kentucky Home . . . Jeanie with the light brown hair . . . Old Folks at Home. . . . And with them their banjos and cotton bales, their slow brown rivers. . . . Read the rest of this entry »

Saxophone Combined With Organ

TONE modulation such as only the most accomplished wind instrument artist can achieve can now be duplicated by a beginner as a result of a new instrument called the solfia now being manufactured in Germany. The new wind instrument is played with a mouthpiece similar to that of a saxophone, but the notes are controlled by an organ keyboard. An air chamber within the device modulates the tone and adds resonance.

Inside The Music-Box of Giant Bells

IN the bell loft of the Rockefeller church in New York it suspended the first of the tuned carrillons, the smallest bells of which are shown above. The resonance of a bell, which lasts for several moments, has previously prevented accurate tuning of carrillons, but this age-old annoyance has been eliminated by a system of bell dampers invented by G. M. Giannini.
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