Phong announced his discovery at a seminar on the soul and sounds of the Vietnamese monochord held late last month at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

“The monochord was brought out of Vietnam 108 years ago,” said Phong, a world-renowned musician and researcher awarded the American National Heritage Fellowship in 1997.

Phong said the monochord was brought to the US by Frederick Stearns, a Detroit millionaire who was known for his passionate interest in musical instruments.

“Stearns traveled to many countries and his collection of musical instruments became bigger and bigger,” Phong said.

Between 1914 and 1917, Stearns presented to the University of Michigan his collection of musical instruments numbering nearly 1,000 pieces.

The collection was subsequently named the Stearns Collection of Musical Instruments, which now contains more than 2,500 pieces of historical and contemporary musical instruments from around the world.

Phong said Stearns visited an international music fair organised in Paris in 1900 and he bought the Vietnamese monochord exhibited there.

However, the monochord was then placed in the Cambodian Collection displayed at the University of Michigan, along with 19 musical instruments that the millionaire brought from France.

Phong showed the difference between Vietnamese and Cambodian monochords and the requisite musical skills to play a monochord at the seminar in January, attended by many music researchers.

“The magical and unique sounds of the Vietnamese monochord are different from those obtained from any monochord in the world,” Phong said.

Born in 1946 in the Cuu Long (Mekong) Delta province of Vinh Long, Phong studied Vietnam’s traditional music as a child and moved to France in 1974 where he performed frequently and earned a doctorate in ethno-musicology from Sorbonne University in 1982.

Phong, who is a professor at Kent State University in Ohio and the University of Washington, also teaches at universities in Europe and Asia.

Phong is the second Vietnamese, after veteran musician researcher Tran Van Khe, to have his name and biography entered in the New Grove, an international dictionary of music.