The Oilcloth Bellows

A sound laboratory high in a New York office building on a bright winter morning, steel-framed windows onto snowy rooftops, walls hung with grey felt, on a bare oak table a wedge-shaped bellows thirty-one centimetres long, its top a dark brown grained plate edged with a row of small nail heads and fitted with a short chrome spout, its sloping sides of creased yellowish oilcloth, beside it the voice unit, a short chromed cylinder with two dark knobs, a small right-angled tube and a curved amber translucent mouth tube, steel tuning forks in a wooden stand behind, a hand in a grey suit sleeve pressing down on the bellows.