Ceno-Orchestra

There were strange goings-on at Philadelphia's proud Academy of Music one afternoon last week. The stage was apparently deserted but emanating from it like phantom music came the shimmering sounds of Rimsky-Korsakov's Russian Easter, reproduced as faithfully as if the Philadelphia Orchestramen were sitting in their accustomed places, the violins down front on the left of the stage, the brasses farther back on the right, with cymbals, bells and kettledrums behind. There were other weird happenings that afternoon. Footsteps sounded spookily on the empty stage. Voices were heard asking for hammers and saws and a band of unseen carpenters seemed to start pounding away on the boards. Again the unseen orchestra played, this time the finale to Wagner's Gotterdammerung. It climbed to such mighty crescendos that even hard-headed scientists sitting in the audience could imagine that 2,000 men or more were playing to them.

Conductor Leopold Stokowski was demonstrating a new "Ceno-orchestra System,"* result of a two-year experiment with Bell Telephone Laboratories. Dr. Stokowski sat in the back of the auditorium busily twisting dials, manipulating switches. Three floors above in the Academy ballroom his Orchestra, conducted by Alexander Smallens, played into specially-sensitized microphones which relayed the music to three loudspeakers concealed behind curtains backstage.

Hitherto one loudspeaker has been considered sufficient to transmit orchestral music. The use of three last week, strategically placed, was what distributed the sound as though the players were on the stage, gave what engineers called "auditory perspective." The filters and amplifiers, which Stokowski manipulated, brought out the faintest whispers of the violins as they never have been brought out before. The climaxes, louder than any orchestra could have achieved unaided, were almost deafening but they were not distorted. Offstage singing was also reproduced, with force and clarity.

In his ardor to build up one of the Wagnerian crescendos Conductor Stokowski twisted a dial off his control desk. In a speech after the demonstration he prophesied a day when "there will be music in small-town auditoriums as splendid as that which is now played by fine symphony orchestras in large cities. ... I can imagine spacious gardens of pleasure in which happy idlers, after a brief day's work, wander amid the trees while they listen to the strains of great music played in some distant music tower."

*Punned by engineers as "So-No-Orchestra System."

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