Home-Made Folk Instruments from Dennis Havlina
Dennis Havlina, an instrepreneur from Michigan, runs a website full of music resources and information about DIY musical instrument projects including construction details and instructions. Read On!
Pyrophones and Explosion Organs!
Pyrophones, also known as explosion/fire organs, are musical instruments which are sounded by explosions, fire, rapid combustion, rapid heating, and other thermoacoustic devices. The combustion occurs inside of the actual resonance chamber (the pipe). Fire organs are said to have been around since the 1700s! Read On!
Computer Controlled Wine-Glass Thing
Here’s a curious percussion machine created by yaaaratheone for a Physical Computing class at Union College, NY. Read On!
Beethoven’s 9th Symphony x 22.15 = Very, Very Slow Classical Music
Leif Inge, an idea-based artist from Norway, stretched Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to last 24 hours without any pitch distortion. “[The source music] lasts approximately 65 minutes, hence the applied expansion-factor is about 22.15.” This rendition, entitled ‘9 Beet Stretch,’ is unrecognizably slow, creating an entirely different mood than that of the iconic original. The magnified notes are pleasurable in the most cogitative way. Read On!
Making an Ice Didgeridoo on the Glaciers of Antarctica
To liven up the dull moments of living on the Antarctic ice, ANSMET scientists and engineers built a didgeridoo out of H2O and butter! Instead of the usual game of “counting the number of grains in a teaspoon of snow,” ANSMET (Antarctic Search for Meteorites) pursued the mission of building a didgeridoo. Read On!
Listen to a Sunrise
Richard Widerberg from Göteborg, Sweden has some very odd and interesting sound recordings on his website including a track entitled “Sunrisescape” which makes use of light sensors and two oscillators to record the gradual illumination of a rising sun. Read On!
Glass Music from the Glass Duo
The Glass Duo is composed of Polish musicians Anna and Arkadiusz Szafraniec. Apparently they have built the largest glass harp in the world which covers four and a half octaves! Read On!
The Cristal Baschet (Crystal Organ)
The Cristal Baschet, also known as the crystal organ, sounds very much like it’s crystallophone similitude, the glass armonica. Both of these instruments are friction idiophones, that is they produce their sounds when their glass ‘keys’ (in this case, 54 chromatically tuned glass rods) are vibrated, usually by a wet finger. Read On!
Miniature Japanese Aerophone
The Japanese magazine, Science for Adults (Otonanokagaku), has some absolutely astonishing musical instrument kits including this miniature pipe organ. Songs are programmed into a paper card which controls the organ’s airflow as it is fed through the instrument. Read On!
Nick Cave’s Sound Suits
Nick Cave, an artist and educator working out of Chicago, is the creator of full body “soundsuits” which are made from layers of metal, plastic, fabric, hair, found objects, and other things that rub together to make noise. Many of Cave’s soundsuits are politically/socially inspired and have deeper meanings than just looking fantastic and making rustle sounds. Read On!
“Longest Concert Ever” Is Actually 1000 Years
The ringing sounds coming out of the lighthouse at Trinity Buoy Warf, London are blips from a 1,000-year-long opus. This millennial organism, entitled Longplayer, was born at midnight on the 31st of December 1999 and will (hopefully) continue living until that same moment in 2999. The Longplayer can be heard from various listening posts around the world and via a live audio stream (which I suggest you plug into now while reading the rest of the article). Read On!
Monome Videos
A monome, besides being contemporary sexy, is a key and light board which, using community created applications, can do virtually anything imaginable. Expect to pay between $500 (for the 64 button) and $1,500 (128), that’s if you can even get on the waiting list OR you could buy a kit and do it yourself! Read On!
“Carol of the Bells” on Array Mbira
A beautiful rendition of the song “Carol of the Bells,” played on array mbira (which, like all fixed-at-one-end tongue instruments, is classified as a lamellophone). Read On!
Bill G. Loyd’s Giant Wind Bells
Browsing through Madrid, New Mexico today, I stumbled across some wonderful wind bells/gongs on display at the Range West gallery. These bells, made by the Truchas, NM artist Bill G. Loyd, are cut from recycled gas tanks (e.g. scuba tanks, CO2 canisters, O2 firefighter tanks, etc.). Read On!
Latex-Glove Bagpipes and More from Catalonia
L’Atrapa-sons is a television program from the Tv3 network in Catalonia. Check ‘em out. Read On!
An Arsenal of Oddstruments
Ken Butler’s “hybrid instruments” – Axe, crossbow, and assault rifle violins? Shovel tablas, easel guitars, umbrella igils, and toothbrush violas? Oh my! Watch Ken put a mic in his mouth and play his entire face! Read On!
The Longest Concert Ever Has Reached Its 6th Note!
The slowest piece of music ever is currently being played in the church of St. Burchardi in Halberstadt, Germany. John Cage’s project is called ORGAN2/ASLSP (for ‘as slow as possible’). It began in 2000 and has just reached it’s sixth note! Read On!
Playing the US/Mexico Border With Instruments of Mass Percussion
An interesting sound project by Glenn Weyant: “The Anta Project is a series of recordings blended in a multi-track laptop environment to create a single sonic collage of the U.S./Mexico border near Nogales, Arizona.” Read On!
How to Play a Building
If you haven’t heard about this already, it’s a pretty cool idea. Basically, David Byrne attached a bunch of lopsided motors and solenoids to the structural steel in an old ferry station/slaughter house in New York City. The motors/solenoids, controlled by a recycled organ, vibrate/strike different elements of the building such as pipes, radiators, girders, columns, and beams! No amplification was used in the project; just the natural resonance of the building itself. Read On!
Call This Number! Odd Instrument Telephone Speaker
Call +4790369389 to have your voice blasted into the luscious lands of Norway! Telemegaphone Dale is a 23-foot-tall wind-powered loudspeaker sculpture that picks up incoming calls and projects them into the nearby surroundings. This Telemegaphone, created by the Swedish designers at Unsworn Industries, is located on a mountain overlooking the village of Dalsfjord in Western Norway. Apparently, a “massive” amount of people have been calling. Read On!
Mike Evans’ Spiral Instrument
Mike Evans is an incredible sculptor in Santa Fe and this is one of his more abstract works. Read On!
“Acoustic Radars” and Listening Trumpets
Before the advent of radar and hearing aids, hearing “trumpets” and the like were used to amplify distant sounds. Acoustic radars were invented during war time to locate ships in the fog and approaching airplanes. These listening devices not only enabled the listener to hear subtle, distant sounds, but also allowed for great accuracy in pinpointing the direction of the sound source due to the increased spacing and size of the giant “ears.” Some of these devices are very accurate, for example, the German RRH is able to detect the size of an approaching aircraft formation 8 miles away with the directional accuracy of 2 degrees. Read On!