B882 <=> B884 [BTG XLI The bokharian dervish, p. 883]

“’When I came to this queer friend of mine and explained to him what I wanted to obtain and what help I expected of him, he also immediately became very much interested in this and promised to help me in every way possible.

“’And the very next day we started work together.

“’From this joint work, the skeleton of this mechanical musical instrument devised by me was soon ready. I myself marked and spaced the places for the corresponding strings, while my queer friend continued to work on the mechanism of the little hammers.

“’And then, when I had finished stretching the strings and had begun to tune them correspondingly, just then that began which aroused that further interest in me which brought me to the experiments concerning the laws of vibrations which I began and am still continuing.

“’It began in this way:

“’I must first tell you that before this I already very well knew that half the length of any string gives twice the number of vibrations of a whole string of equal volume and density, and in accordance with this principle I arranged on the zimbal what are called “bridges” for the strings and then began correspondingly to tune all the strings for a certain ancient sacred melody in “one-eighth-toned” sounds, of course according to my “Perambarrsasidaan” or, as it is called in Europe, “tuning fork,” producing the vibrations of the Chinese absolute note “do.”

“’It was during this tuning that I first clearly constated that the principle, namely, that the number of the vibrations of a string is inversely proportional to its length, does not always but only sometimes coincide with the obtaining of what is called a “common blending harmonic consonance.”