Yeah, I like whistles. This one's made from a brass tube and a wooden dowel from a craft store. The fipple was cut with a hacksaw, and the finger holes drilled with a drill press.
instrument-a-day 19: brass whistle
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Category Archives: instrument-a-day 2011
instrument-a-day 18: garbage drainpipe
Someone left a big chunk of gutter drain pipe in the garbage, and a sturdy wooden handle, just for me.
instrument-a-day 17: wooden strings & rattles
I lasercut some strips of poplar for another project, and found that the waste wood could be plucked like guitar strings. The strips make pretty good rattles too.
instrument-a-day 16: light sensor
It's just a photodiode, a 9-volt battery, and a little amplifier, but it makes the vibrations in artificial light audible. A lot of what you hear is derived from 60Hz AC power, but electronic displays have tones of their own.
instrument-a-day 15: piano scanner
Scanning a handheld magnetic pickup back and forth over the piano strings makes a pretty neat sound. I may try attaching a rail on which the pickup can slide back and forth.
The pickup is plugged into an ordinary guitar amp.
Plug: Fun with Sensors workshop this Saturday at NYC Resistor!
instrument-a-day 14: corn music
I’ve always thought the patterns on corncobs looked like player piano rolls. So I wrote a program that watches a slowly-turning corncob. Whenever a particularly dark kernel crosses the centerline of the image, it plays a note corresponding to the height.
You can download the Processing code from moonmilk.com/11/02/cornscan.txt.
instrument-a-day 13: garbage garbage can lid
On the way to SHARE last night, I
packed a contact microphone and drumsticks but no instrument, telling
myself I’d find something in the garbage on the way there. What I
found was this nice metal garbage can lid.
packed a contact microphone and drumsticks but no instrument, telling
myself I’d find something in the garbage on the way there. What I
found was this nice metal garbage can lid.
instrument-a-day 12: failed box xylophone
It doesn’t really work. I put it into the scrap wood bin.
instrument-a-day 11: ice smash!
Found a beautiful cracked frozen puddle in the park and flung some ice around.
instrument-a-day 10: fish whistle
Practice for Saturday’s laser whistle workshop. It’s cut from 1/4″ poplar. I won’t post the cutting plan until I figure out why only one of its two whistles is hooting and fix the problem!
