(Isaac Asimov, 1945)
Magnifco fairly hurled himself out of his seat and caught the multi-keyed instrument. He fingered the myriad knobby contacts and threw a sudden back somersault of joy, to the imminent destruction of the nearby furniture.
He croaked, “A Visi-Sonor – and of a make to distill joy out of a dead man’s heart.” His long fingers caressed softly and slowly, pressing lightly on contacts with a rippling motion, resting momentarily on one key then another – and in the air before them there was a soft glowing rosiness, just inside the range of vision.…
Mis said in a conversational tone to Bayta, “Ever hear a Visi-Sonor?”
“Once,” said Bayta, equally casually, “at a concert of rare instruments. I wasn’t impressed.”
“Well, I doubt that you came across good playing. There are very few really good players. It’s not so much that it requires physical co-ordination – a multi-bank piano requires more, for instance – as a certain type of free-wheeling mentality.”…
…You know how the beblistered thing works? I looked it up for this purpose, and all I’ve made out so far is that its radiations stimulate the optic center of the brain directly, without ever touching the optic nerve. It’s actually the utilization of a sense never met with in ordinary nature. Remarkable, when you come to think of it. What you hear is all right. That’s ordinary. Eardrum, cochlea, all that. But – Shh! He’s ready.
In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, the course of civilization can be predicted hundreds and thousands of years into the future thanks to psychohistory, a field that mathematically models collective behavior based on statistical regularities in how humans respond to situations. But what if something – or someone – could manipulate people’s emotions, bending their actions away from statistical regularities and toward their own ends? In the right (or rather, the wrong) hands, the Visi-Sonor has that power: this “multi-keyed instrument” produces sound as we know it while simultaneously acting upon an unknown sense to produce colors and shapes. As Bayta finds as she listens, “each little movement of color had its own little pattern of sound,” and “the sound of a hundred instruments flowed in liquid streams until she could not tell it from the light.” In this, the Visi-Sonor recalls Aldous Huxley’s color organ and related synaesthetic instruments. But when played by a telepath who possesses the ability to manipulate people’s emotions with his mind, “the Visi-Sonor acts as a focusing device. In a way, it is a primitive device for emotional-control itself.” At risk of spoilers, we say no more.
Text: Isaac Asimov, “The Mule (part 1),” Astounding Science Fiction (November 1945), 49-50. Republished in the second book of the Foundation series, Foundation and Empire (1952)
Image: Foundation and Empire 1986 edition book cover art by Michael Whelan
Thanks to Melinda Rice for alerting us to this instrument.