This is a not very successful experiment with translating live video into sound. I’m gonna keep messing with it, though, until it turns into something interesting.
instrument-a-day 8: bzzzzzz
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Category Archives: instrument-a-day 2012
instrument-a-day 7: speak and play!
Speak and Play! is a speech synthesizer for pianists. It has two parts: a score generator that turns written English text into musical scores, and a sample set (hurriedly constructed from my own voice) which, when used to play the scores, approximately recreates the original text.
Thanks to pianist Margaret Leng Tan for making Speak and Play! speak and play, and for coming up with the name!
More details below…
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instrument-a-day 6: acrylic slide whistle
a slide whistle made from some scraps of acrylic tube and rod, and lubricated with olive oil.
instrument-a-day 5: brass free reeds
Primitive accordion-style free reeds, made from basswood and strips of brass. They take a LOT of wind to play – I almost passed out while recording the soundtrack. I also broke one of them, so I tapped and scraped on the reed instead of blowing it.
They have a nice deep tone with a lot of promise, so I hope to work with this technique more. I used this reference while building them.
I didn’t manage to record any video, so the demo video is pretty bland.
instrument-a-day 4: printed panpipes
I designed some panflute-like whistles and printed them on a Makerbot. They’re disappointing – hard to play, and pathetic sounds. But you can download the design files and improve them for me! www.thingiverse.com/thing:17020 and www.thingiverse.com/thing:17023
instrument-a-day 3: good old wooden whistle
Sometimes the old classics are the best.
instrument-a-day 2: tiny combustion
The tiny sounds of a burning match.
instrument-a-day 1: westminster doorbell
Day 1: the Westminster Doorbell, made of a couple of steel rods suspended over a guitar pickup. I’m learning how to get more overtones out of it, but I haven’t really figured it out yet.
instrument-a-day starts tomorrow!
On February 1 I’m embarking on my yearly endeavor to make a new handmade instrument every single day of the month. This will be the fifth year I’ve done this — you can see the results of the previous years here or on flickr. As usual, I’m trying not to plan ahead at all – I have no idea what I’ll make tomorrow.
Here’s a video with highlights from several years of noisy noises:
28 noisy noises from ranjit on Vimeo.