strengleikar

I never played with that classic children's toy, the "telephone" made of two tin cans and a piece of string, although I knew about it as a theoretical entity. But in my thought-experiment-prone mind I made plenty of them, and I was always disappointed to see that they were useless to me. The communication at a distance I wanted to take part in was inevitably one in which my interlocutor was out of sight, around a corner. The edge of the sheetrock wall or the bend in the staircase would have stopped the signal like a finger pressed onto a fretboard, and nothing would have gotten through.

More fascinating to me in actual practice was an ungainly instrument made for me by a family friend out of a cigarbox, a chair leg, a nylon string, and a tuning peg. I would twist the peg forwards and backwards, loosening and tightening, and make the plucked string twang crazily up and down the scale.