The suikinkutsu, literally meaning ‘water harp chamber,’ is an underground Japanese water instrument which is usually located in temple gardens and places of ceremony. The water chime consists of an upside down pot with a small hole through it’s bottom. The upside down pot is buried underground, with a porous rock layer above [...]

The Garden Instrument Contest is now over and all of the entries are in. Please read through the submissions below, pick your favorite instrument, and vote!
Entry #1: Ranjit’s “Trumpet Marine”

I wanted to do a sound sculpture for the Figment Festival, which is held on Governors Island, a former military base in New York [...]

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.

After several failed [...]

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. You can find this recording here.
Is this a new form of photography?

Ralph, the head of the US’s Antarctic Search for Meteorites program, is looking for a portable wind instrument to add some musical warmth to the frigid zen-like region of the East Antarctic Polar Plateau. Ralph and his team spend weeks camping in the desolate ice and need your help!

Ralph writes,
I run the US’s Antarctic [...]

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.). From Loyd’s bio, “the qualities of each [...]