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Ultracembalo
Fictional musical and visual instrument from the 1970 short story "The Song the Zombie Sang" by Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg. The story originally appeared in the December 1970 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine. It is controlled by electronic gloves.
From the Fourth Balcony of the Los Angeles Music Center the stage was little more than a brilliant blur of constantly changing chromatics—stabs of bright green, looping whorls of crimson, But Rhoda preferred to sit up there. She had no use for the Golden Horseshoe seats, buoyed on their grab-grav plates, bobbling loosely just beyond the fluted lip of the stage. Down there the sound flew off, flew up and away, carried by the remarkable acoustics of the Center’s Takamuri dome. The colors were important, but it was the sound that really mattered, the patterns of resonance bursting from the hundred quivering outputs of the ultracembalo.
