The orphalon was discovered by Freddie Cheesecake. He found it in the basement of a house outside Thunder Bay wrapped in a wool blanket beside three jars of peaches. It was the size of a cello but shaped like something remembering a cello incorrectly. The body was wooden, but nobody could identify the wood. Nine strings on the front, two on the back and one running through the inside where it could neither be seen nor, tuned. No tuning pegs. There were seven small brass wheels labelled with symbols resembling weather. The orphalon was played sitting down, except for one passage in the only known composition for orphalon, during which the instructions said:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
STAND, BUT DO NOT RISE.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The right hand used a bow made from horsehair and copper wire. The left hand never touched the strings. It hovered several inches above them. Moving one’s fingers altered the pitch. Closing your fist produced vibrato. Pointing at the ceiling lowered everything by a semitone. The orphalon had four sound holes. Three faced the listener. The fourth faced the musician. This was unfortunate because certain notes sounded completely different to the player than to everyone else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The lowest note resembled a bass clarinet being heard through a frozen lake. The highest sounded like a wineglass remembering an argument. The middle register was the strangest. People three rooms away could hear it clearly while people standing beside the instrument sometimes heard nothing. Recording engineers hated it. Microphones captured sounds the audience hadn’t heard and ignored sounds everyone agreed had occurred. One engineer spent six hours positioning microphones before announcing:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“This thing is lying.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The orphalon was discovered by Freddie Cheesecake. He found it in the basement of a house outside Thunder Bay wrapped in a wool blanket beside three jars of peaches. It […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"Layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[900],"tags":[],"class_list":["entry","author-rockbob","post-9678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-tales"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9678"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9678\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}