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Lithophone

Musical Instrument
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

An ancient musical instrument consisting of tuned stone slabs struck with mallets, producing resonant tones used in ritual or poetic performance.

Detailed Definition
The lithophone’s earthy, resonant tones appear in eco-poetry and archaeological verse to symbolize geological time, ancestral ritual, and the music of the land; its prehistoric origins make it a metaphor for the deep roots of human lyrical expression.
Example
Example in poetry:
Prehistoric poets imagined the lithophone as “mountain bones singing when struck”; Each stone slab rings with geological time; “Lithophone sounds—dinosaurs dream in granite”; In eco-poetry, the lithophone merges human and earth music: “We strike stone; stone strikes back in song.”
Additional Notes
The lithophone is a percussion instrument made of tuned stones struck with mallets; found globally from Neolithic sites to modern compositions, it connects music to geology—ideal for poems about deep time, the earth’s voice, or the resonance of stone as archive of human and planetary history.
Also Known As
Stone chime
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