The park near my house is a collection point for old christmas trees to be recycled. Someone dumped a bunch of bamboo in the pile (christmas bamboo?) so I grabbed a stalk and let it dry for a month. This bamboo really wants to split – in fact, I can hear the flute spontaneously disintegrating in the other room.
This is a Native-American-style flute (two chambers, with an external air passage connecting the two) made with guidance from Sammy Tedder’s page.
It sounds like this.
Clay pots, wood, brass, and hardware. (The flower pots had a previous life as companions to Trumpet Marine!)
It’s a very windy day today so I wanted to make a windchime. Sorry about the sound quality, but, well, it’s windy. You can hear birds singing and other people’s windchimes in the background. It sounds like this.
While walking the dog I found a slab of marble in a heap of renovation trash. So of course I took it home and made a gong. Beaten with one wooden drumstick and one plastic-tipped drumstick, it sounds like this.
Laser-cut basswood and wood glue. I took a laser cutter class today at NYC Resistor and decided to make whistles based on the classic design of organ pipes. If you have a laser cutter of your own, you can download the plans here.
The wood’s not polished or stained, just burned a nice brown around the edges by the laser. It smells terrible.
I made two sizes of whistle; they sound like this.
Buddha Box, wire, brass, and conductive foam.
The Buddha Box is a little electronic gadget that plays any of 12 chants over and over again. I wired it up with a brass tablet and drumstick so I can play it like a drum– each hit switches to a new chant. (A little bit of conductive foam on the end of the drumstick muffles the tapping sound.)
It sounds like this.
Not enough time today to build a harpsichord or a kazoo or something, so in honor of the solution today of the Mystery of the Syrup Smell of New York, I took a jar of fenugreek seeds and played along with a famous movie scene. The results sounded like this.
p.s. I cooked potatoes with fenugreek a few days ago. Delicious!
Made from a piece of dried up seaweed from a California beach, the mouthpiece from a junked clarinet or something, and a reed cut from the lid of a takeout food container. It sounds like this. (My fingers can only reach two sound holes, so I can only get three notes until I get more practice with breath and lip pressure on the reed.)
Noisemakers that can be cut and folded from a thin sheet of stiff plastic. This is a variation on the drinking straw double reed. They sound like this.
The plastic I used is Avery 11900 Insertable Dividers (this also works great in a Craft-Robo!) To make your own: cut a rectangle about 1.5 by 3 inches. Fold in thirds the long way to make a little burrito, and crease the folds. Cut one end to a blunt-ended triangle as in the photo. Unroll the burrito, cut off the outermost triangle, and re-fold. Squish it between your fingers a bit so that it bulges a little, put the pointy end inside your lips and blow. With some practice you can get a horrible squawk out of it.
