Homebrew Musical Instruments?

Josh Booth asks: "Has anyone ever built a musical instrument? I recently built two, a SSPACaRTD (Single String Plucked Air Compression and Rarifaction Tunable Device), and a full size string bass for the NJ State Science Olympiad. I played the bass and, since we did the required duet, my friend played an End Struck Plosive Aerophone, or a set rather, like what the Blue Man Group plays. We placed fifth out of 20+ schools. My bass is similar to those that Dennis Havlena made and used weedwhacker line for strings. I was wondering whether anyone else tried to build an instrument. How did you do it, what did it sound like, and how weird was it?"

Comments

Do programs count?

[Anonymous Cowdog]

Some of my first C programs were playing with reading files byte by byte and outputting sounds based on the byte values. That was fun; should try it again sometime. You can hear the difference between different kinds of files, text versus binary for example.

Space music

[Ibix]

The first year physics undergrads at my university have short projects in the summer term. One of the cooler ones I've seen was a kind of musical instument. It was an upward-looking proximity detector (IR, I think). It played a tone when it detected an object. It believed in eight different distances, and played a different tone for each.

I'm not very musical. The best I could do was get a scale out of it by putting my hand close to the sensor, and then lifting my hand. The guys who'd made it had obviously practicing, because they were waving their hands in the air over the thing, making it play tunes (limited to whole tones in one octave, but tunes nontheless). It made me think of Glen A. Larson science fiction series, for some reason...

I

Large Hot Pipe Organ

[bhima]

This, without a doubt is my favorite! And it's been on Slashdot before!

http://slashdot.org/articles/00/07/08/195236.shtml

Sargeant Trumpetus On Duty Sah!

[GregWebb]

Hmm, wonder if anyone here saw me as that? :-)

I'm a trumpeter, and you can make a basic brass instrument out of almost anything. All you need is a tube of some description with a bore somewhere between the diameter of your little finger and, say 3-4 inches. If you can seal the end with some form of bung so you can get an airtight seal for a mouthpiece, all the better. This way I've played kettles, teapots, chairs, relay batons, hoovers and hoses. I've seen a rifle played, open at the breach. Sound quality and range aren't normally great but hey, you're probably doing this for effect anyway so work out something you _can_ play on it and just do that.

Anyway, I was on the staff at a kid's summer holiday club and we had a Roman theme that year. I normally ran a silly games slot, and so this year I was being an incompetent dril sargeant setting all sorts of challenges. I had a colander for my helmet, a tray for a breastplate and a soup ladle tucked into my belt. Every day, to announce my presence, I'd whip out this huge home-made post horn and play the _worst_ fanfare you can imagine, and that would signal the start of proceedings.

It was a 2m long length of 15mm plastic pipe. I then made an expanded polystyrene bung at one end to seal a mouthpiece in place and jammed the largest kitchen funnel I could find into the other end - which, happily, fitted very neatly. Being plastic and having polystyrene for a critical interface this thing resonated absolutely horribly, had no useful tone and a really odd range. It wasn't rigid so flopped around all over the place and if I wasn't very careful when putting the mouthpiece in I knocked the bung out. You could get a really, really bad fanfare on it, though, which was most of the point of the exercise and it did get a laugh :-)

I wouldn't recommend this particular construction for anyone after music not comedy but we did finish the week with a duet of the Prince of Denmark's March on a kettle and a teapot. You can actually get quite a good note out of them, and even use the lid to modulate volume! Tiring to play though.

Not lately

[orthogonal]

Has anyone ever built a musical instrument?

Of course, until very recently -- I'm guessing the last century or two -- many musical instruments were made by their users, or by persons -0 like furniture makers -- who made instruments as a side-line.

Exceptions of course would probably be very large instruments -- church organs, the larger pianos -- and instruments made by dedicated instruments makers first for court musicians and later for professional orchestras.

But outside of royal halls and opera houses relying on noble patronage, popular music was probably produced by musicians who had some hand in making their own instruments. Think of the violin-picker in Appalachia, or the rebec playing sailor drifting down the Volga or the Don* -- or the Mississippi. Consider the lonely Spanish shepherd playing a bladder pipe horn made from one of his former charges -- or an equally lonely Texas cowboy plucking a Jew's harp

* I'm thinking of the Russian Don, but it could as well be the river in England, the river in Scotland, or the river in Canada; the rebec was probably known in each place and was always an instrument of the lower classes. A guide to traditional instruments can be found here.

Given the amount of money spent on CDs -- and the amount of downloading --, it's not hard to see that music is central in some way to the human experience. We've all felt it the lump in the throat listening to a mournful folk song about a love irrevocably ended; we've all had to grin at the infectious sound of a waltz; had our blood rush faster to the beat of a military march (marches are Turkish in origin, and entered the West through Vienna, almost as the Turks themselves did in 1683); felt pride and pathos at the sound of our national anthem.

Tom Paine, in his argument for Deism, Age of Reason even opines that the men and women that the Bible calls prophets were in fact musicians, taking for his text 1 Samuel, chapter 10, verse 5: "...thou shalt meet a company of prophets coming down from the high place with a psaltery, and a tabret, and a pipe, and a harp, before them; and they shall prophesy...." Paine goes on to show this is not an isolated passage:

Deborah and Barak are called prophets, not because they predicted anything, but because they composed the poem or song that bears their name, in celebration of an act already done. David is ranked among the prophets, for he was a musician, and was also reputed to be (though perhaps very erroneously) the author of the Psalms. But Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are not called prophets; it does not appear from any accounts we have, that they could either sing, play music, or make poetry.

Now imagine a world without portable mp3 players -- I'm listing to music from the Stuart Age (1600s) on my handled right now --, without CD players, without even eight track tape players or phonographs. Imagine no TV or radio or Internet. Would you not still have the same desire to hear music and feel the emotions it calls up in you? How else to ensure the presence of music in your life but to learn to play an instrument yourself? And unless you were one of the small minority of the wealthy, how would you get a instrument? You'd purchase one cheaply from a more or less amateur instrument maker, or better, you'd make a simple instrument yourself.

It is one of the trade-offs of modernity, I suppose: I have at hand, on my computer, over 8000 mps -- from Bach to Bob Dylan -- more musical variety than all but the wealthiest of kings could ever have collected prior to the invention of the phonograph. I have a dozen operas, including two different productions of Wagner's four opera Ring Cycle. And my music is immediately accessible -- I don't even have to change a record or pen a CD case. I can even listen to it on my handled via WiFi, so as not to disturb the neighbors. With a credit card, or a KaZaa client, I can download nearly an

Re:I make instruments for a living.

[Anonymous Coward]

I love it when people decide what they will consider to be an "instrument" or "music" or more often the argument is whether or not something is a "sport". You don't decide the definitions of words for yourselves. That causes mis-communication. The definition of a word is the agreed upon symbolic representation of an idea by a set of sounds.

There is a place where they keep track of these definition things. It's called the Oxford English Dictionary.

3. spec. A contrivance for producing musical sounds, by the vibrations of some solid material (as strings, reeds, rods, membranes, etc.), or of a body of air in a pipe or tube.

There are other meanints of instrument, but that is the one that applies. A synthesizer is part of an instrument. Combined with speakers and other electronic devices they form a contrivance for producing musical sounds by the vibrations of some solid material.

Well Boredom works for me.

[jellomizer]

When I get really board I start making instruments out of anything I can find.

Some of my best sounding ones include.

A Coffee mug and some rubber bands. You take the rubber bands and put them around the coffee cup. and you change the tension of each band over the mouth of the cup. Then you pluck them and get a good sound.

Many bottles and some water (Glass sounds best but plastic works to). You fill the bottles with different amount of water and blow across them to achieve sound.

Raisin boxes of different sizes. Just open up one end and blow threw the other.

Scrap pipes and some string or wire. just put different sized pipes hanging on some wire and hit them with a stick.

A paper towel role. you put it in front on you mouth and vibrate your lips. Better results occur on longer tubes like vacuums cleaner extenders but that is not recommended until you clean them.

A Hair Comb and some of the plastic that is used to wrap individual slices of american cheese. Just put the plastic over then teeth of the comb and do a low hum.

Sound can occur anywhere you can get something to vibrate.

Harpsichord...

[adamjaskie]

I know you can buy harpsichord kits. A quick Google search for "harpsichord kit" turns up many results, but I don't know what company would be best, so I can't really recommend anything. I am thinking of doing one of those myself one of these days. Its a fun instrument to play. The harpsichord makes a really unique sound.

trombone, bass, drums

[zeno_]

When I was in high school (many years ago), we made a functional trombone out of PVC pipe with a funnel for the bell. The beauty of the trombone is that anyone can make a slide out of pipes (with an inner tube that just barely fits within the outer tube) but it's hard to make valves! The mouthpiece was the metal end of a garden hose. It sounded fantastic though ended up keyed in 'A'.

I also made the ubiquitous bass. Plywood body, 2x4 neck, weedwacker cord for 3 strings, but I had to use picture hanging wire for the E string. I couldn't get the weedwacker cord to tune that low without getting rattly. I used 2" eyebolts for the tuners. It sounded great, though you needed the strings on there for about a week before it would stay in tune for more than about 2 minutes.

For the cheap percussion, we made drums out of a set of tupperware mounted in a plywood stand. The cymbals were made of metal pie plates.

Since all of us were in the jazz band, we played a jazz improv for our chosen music piece. Won first place, though this was in Georgia, so make of that what you will. :-)

digeridoos

[Anonymous Coward]

...can be made from PVC/ABS pipe, available from your friendly local hardware superstore. Get the 2.5 inch ID pipe, between 4 and 8 ft long, and Google for digerdoo and PVC.

hah, me too (an interesting story)

[orangesquid]

When this event was first given a trial run at nationals, there were these sorts of entries:
- people with very very nicely built flutes and stringed instruments and such... these people knew precious little of the physics behind their instruments
- me and my friend, with some crappy pvc-pipe creations that were played like brass instruments... and we built them to be (close to) on pitch, because we knew the equations like the backs of our hands

Guess who scored well? =) It is science olympiad, after all...