Introducing the Pandiatonic Autoharp, a modified autoharp that can play entire scales rather than just 1 chord at a time

Equipment
1

Pandiatonic Autoharp

Earlier this year (during quarantine) I bought an Autoharp with the plan of modifying it so that it could play entire scales rather than just 1 chord at a time.

I bought 12 additional blank felt bars, and my gf helped me to cut the felt on each so that 1 bar mutes 1 pitch class (i.e. all octaves of a note) when its button is depressed.

I was so jazzed when the project worked as planned! Luckily I have small hands, so I’m able to push down 5 buttons at once, allowing the remaining 7 notes of the chroma to ring out when the instrument is strummed / plucked / picked.

I created a visual interface to help me figure out which button-depression-combinations correlates to which scale, and wrapped it within my Scale Navigator web app. As I select the scale with Scale Navigator open on my iPad, the Autoharp visual interface shows me which buttons to press to stay harmonically synchronized with the current scale.

9 Likes
2

This is fascinating. Any chance you took photos as you made the modifications?

1 Like
3

Acoustic MIDI scale device, nice ! Good job !
By the way I had never seen the name “acoustic” for a scale, it sounds like a minor melodic mode, is that it ?

1 Like
4

Yes I do have some photos, but I’m unable to upload more than one at a time because I am new to lines. I’ll link to a proper blog post sometime this week that will include all documentation.

1 Like
5

Erno Lendvai uses it in his book about Bartok, but more importantly to my project, Dmitri Tymoczko uses it in his paper scale networks and Debussy

6

Ok, thank you for the link, I’ll real that !

7

The felt bars are a part that wears down so there’s plenty of YouTube tutorials how to cut new ones.

The only difference here is the specific notes each bar is muting.

2 Likes
8

Sorry, forgot to reply that yes, “acoustic”, “melodic minor” and “lydian dominant” are all the same scale