vibraphone

Vibraphone is a compound of Latin vibrare (to vibrate) and Greek phōnē (voice, sound). The instrument was developed in 1921 by Hermann Winterhoff at the Leedy Manufacturing Company in Indianapolis. It consists of aluminum bars arranged like a keyboard, with metal resonator tubes beneath each bar. Inside the tubes, motorized discs rotate, opening and closing the tubes and producing the characteristic vibrato — the shimmering, pulsating tone that gives the instrument its name.

The vibraphone has no historical antecedent. Unlike the xylophone (which evolved from African and Asian wooden-bar instruments), the marimba (from Bantu traditions), or the glockenspiel (from European bell-playing), the vibraphone was engineered from scratch. It is an entirely 20th-century invention. The rotating motor discs that produce its vibrato were a novel idea — nobody had thought to put an electric motor inside a percussion instrument before.

Jazz musicians transformed the vibraphone from a novelty into a serious instrument. Lionel Hampton was the first major jazz vibraphonist, beginning in the late 1930s. Milt Jackson, in the Modern Jazz Quartet, made the vibraphone a melodic instrument of subtlety and depth. Gary Burton revolutionized technique in the 1960s by using four mallets instead of two. The vibraphone found its home in jazz because jazz was the music most open to new sounds.

The word vibraphone is sometimes shortened to 'vibes' — and the slang term 'vibes' (meaning atmosphere, feeling) may be partially influenced by the instrument's dreamy, atmospheric sound, though the connection is debated. The instrument that vibrates gave its nickname to a word that means the feeling of a place.