This Dulcitone tuning fork piano has a 3.5-octave range and was built by Thomas Machell and Sons in the late 1800s or early 1900s. A dulcitone is a keyboard instrument in which sound is produced by a range of tuning forks, which vibrate when struck by felt-covered hammers activated by the keyboard. The tuning forks sound similar to a celesta, but with a sweeter, slightly more complex timbre. The instrument was designed and manufactured by Thomas Machell (and then Thomas Machell and Sons) of Glasgow during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A significant feature of the dulcitone was its portability, a product of its lightweight and compact construction and the fact that the tuning forks (unlike, for instance, the strings of a piano) were not prone to going out of tune.p>
All the notes on this Dulcitone play and sound, but many need tweaking to get it to perfect playing condition. This Dulcitone does not have any cracks in the soundboard (the vast majority these instruments do by now, as they are all around 100 years old).
