dulcitone

plural dulcitones

1. 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.

   Young people love such colourful, easy-to-play instruments as staff-bells, marimbas, dulcitones, etc.

   1981, Australian Journal of Music Education, page 5

   5 more examples

   It would be pleasing could I record the acquirement of dulcitones for these or the regular classes, especially the kindergartens—the dulcitone being the new instrument mentioned in my report of last year—but perhaps they will come in the near future.

   1908, Eleventh Annual Report of the City Superintendent of Schools, page 521

   A dulcitone had just arrived there on which I played, but I am very glad I didn’t close with our Colonel’s offer to buy one—the tone is so wretchedly thin, especially the bass, which has none at all.

   1917 August 3, Artillery and Trench Mortar Memories: 32nd Division, published 1932

   There was a dulcitone in the camp belonging to one of the prisoners, and it sounded very pretty accompanying the songs at the end of ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’.

   1920, F. W. Harvey, Comrades in Captivity: A Record of Life in Seven German Prison Camps

   Wood, the M.O., had a dulcitone, upon which he could perform in no mean fashion, when he felt sufficiently inspired to leave his long chair.

   1922, Langa Langa [pseudonym; Harry Baldwin Hermon-Hodge], Up Against It in Nigeria, New York, N.Y.: E. P. Dutton and Company, page 202

   He preferred, he said, bells, glockenspiels, dulcitones, and marimbas—anything that would whoop, tinkle, and glide with abandon.

   1969, 100 Famous Australian Lives, page 299