Aeolian piano

[Dr Rem]'s linked idea of selectively sounding individual strings of an Aeolian harp by either rotating the entire instrument, or blowing it with a fan, seems to me to be rediculous, since neither moving the fan nor rotating the instrument will satisfactorily select which strings get airflow over them and which are in still air.

So let us mechanise and inventize the process.

The proposed instrument is basically, an aeolian harp, played from a keyboard.

The keyboard works like a pipe organ keyboard, in that each key lifts a pallette which is a kind of Normally Closed air valve. The design of this pneumatic mechanism is well matured in the pipe organ world, so we can progress straight to the next stage by getting a pipe organ and ripping out the pipes. We don't need a big one, we don't need stops and pedals and all that jazz, just a simple portative or chamber organ with one pipe per key will be fine.

The strings work a bit like a piano I suppose. We need to get hold of an old piano and rip off all the keyboard and hammers and everything else leaving us with just the frame, and the soundboard. We need a piano which has the soundboard not totally under the strings, so a normal upright is no good, but a Grand piano should work. Actually a harpsichord might be even better.

Now comes the clever bit. We get some flexible tubing and attach one end of each tube to the wee hole where the organ pipe would have sat on the organ air outlet. We then take the other end of each pipe and mount it on a rack so that it is facing and almost touching the corresponding string of the piano.

Now, when you press a key, a stream of air is directed onto the corresponding string of the piano, exciting it by the von Kármán vortex street effect.

Questions: How to best ensure laminar air flow over the sting? Careful design of tube end or nozzle. Should there be little vertical baffle between each adjacent pair of strings, as a kind of air guide?

More Questions: do the strings need connected to a damper system so that the sound is damped after the key is released?

Deadly final question: the zombie sound of an aeolian harp is at least in part caused by the high harmonics so the wind glisses up and down the harmonic series even on one single string. If we design the positioning of the noxxles with care, can we supress high harmonics and generate a pure tone from a single string using only airflow?