Nordic Psalmodikon MULTiFORMAT

AUDIOSTRiKE | 08/02/2015 | 188 MB

The Nordic Psalmodikon is a single-stringed instrument with a haunting tone, captured in multiple articulations for cinematic and creative music production. The Psalmodikon is a Scandinavian single-stringed instrument for playing hymns in churches. In the early 19th century, many Christian congregations couldn’t afford an organ, so members built their own instruments as substitutes. To simplify the task of learning to play hymns, they burnt numbers into the Psalmodikon. These marked notes on the instrument that corresponded to numbers on printed psalms. The players didn’t have to know musical notation, only to play after the numbers written. Our approach when sampling the Psalmodikon was not to make it “realistic” in the traditional sense. We treated it more progressively, with an open mind as to how it could sound, instead of how it ought to sound.