Motor, battery, bead garland, and drum.
I made a failed whistle, followed by a squawky plastic double reed which didn’t seem worth calling an instrument-of-the-day. Then I bumped a bead garland off of the sewing table, and as it slowly drizzled over the edge, I had the idea for the rain simulator. It sounds like this. Video here.
I’m doing an instrument a day again this month! Here’s the first one.
Monofilament, wooden scraps and dowels, and staples.
It sounds something like this.
Noise Party! On Saturday the 15th I’m doing a family junk-music workshop at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. Make silly instruments and silly noises! Stick around for other cool events! More info at avam.org.
Download poster
National Public Radio’s All Things Considered did a little feature on odd musical instruments on September 28th, and they were kind enough to feature some of my 29 Noisy Noises along with a bunch of other strange and wonderful instruments. You can hear the segment, and see a slideshow of some of the odd instruments, on the All Things Considered website.
Electric Junk Guitar Workshop from ranjit on Vimeo.
On July 30th I’ll be teaching a class at Etsy Labs in Brooklyn, making electric guitars out of junk. Check out the etsy class listing to register for the class, or look at this post on Make.
“The electric guitar is a sophisticated and highly evolved instrument. But you can make your own out of a few bucks worth of junk and parts. Learn to wind your own guitar pickups and build them into a simple one- or two-string junk guitar with a surprisingly nice sound. Depending on your ambition and experience, you can make your junk guitar as simple or as sophisticated as you want, but everybody is guaranteed to go home with at least a fun twangy noisemaker.”
I made a little sound sculpture – a sort of wind-powered banjo – for this weekend’s Figment Festival on Governors Island. Here it is installed on the island’s waterfront by Castle Williams, with a spectacular view of downtown Manhattan. (If you’re in the New York area, come to the festival this weekend – it’s free, and there’s eight million things to see.)
If the wind really picks up, the flowers will spin.
And here’s a video from when I was testing it on my deck.
Update: here’s video from the festival itself.
installation proposal for artbots 2008 from ranjit on Vimeo.
Proposal for Artbots 2008
Simple automatic instruments are constructed from local materials and objects on site. The system learns the sounds it can make by trying out its instruments, and then uses its range of sounds to try to reproduce the rhythmic and melodic qualities of sounds such as the voices of visitors. It then loops and alters these imitative sequences into improvised compositions. (That last part’s not done yet, so you won’t see it in the video.)
In this example, the source audio is a bit of the soundtrack from the movie Citizen Kane, and the noisemakers are a set of found object percussion machines and an electromagnetically fretted electric guitar.
Thanks to everyone who came to the 29 Noisy Noises party on March 1 and helped me celebrate finishing 29 instruments in 29 days! Lots of great people came over and made a lot of great noise on the 29 instruments — you can hear some of it below.
– more party photos from Andrew – more from me
electric jam
“set up a groove”