With a little practice, this could almost be an acceptable sound. I didn’t practice.
instrument-a-day 4: bowed cowbells
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Tag Archives: iad
instrument-a-day 3: playdocarina
The secret to getting a loud clear note out of the soft squishy ocarina was making a sharp-edged lip around the blowhole. As soon as I poked a hole in it, it started to fall apart.
instrument-a-day 1: paper speakers
It’s February, and that means it’s Instrument-a-Day time again! Day 1: paper speakers – experimenting with simple handmade speakers.
[video]
instrument-a-day 1: overtone whistle
Instrument-a-day 2014 begins, as is traditional, with a whistle. This one is made from a 5 foot long PVC tube.
All 7 years of instrument-a-day are archived on flickr.
instrument-a-day 29: rainy day monitor
I stuck contact mics onto a bunch of different plates and vessels and put them out on the rain. I like this sound so much that I’m tempted to make a permanent installation that I can plug in whenever it rains. Inspired by Quintron’s Singing House, which I spent a lot of time listening to last year.
This is the last day of Instrument-a-day 2012. Thanks for following along! I’ll be giving a talk about the project at Dorkbot NYC next Wednesday, March 7th, and performing with Andrea Williams, Dan Joseph, and the Glass Bees in Brooklyn on Saturday the 10th.
instrument-a-day 28: wind up time code
Turning the click-clack of an old wind up motor into MIDI time code to control the playback of a recording. (I’ll try it on with a video next!)
(Inside the box, the wind up motor has a flapping arm that interrupts a light beam. Each clack of the motor generates a MIDI SPP command which tells the computer how far / fast to move through the recording.)
instrument-a-day 27: remote control
That harpsichord bit at the beginning kind of sounds like Dead Can Dance, no?
An IR decoder plugged into an Arduino intercepts codes transmitted by remote controls. Simple software uses the manufacturer code to choose a MIDI channel, and the button code to choose a note. It plays a single percussive note for remote codes it can’t understand, like the Bose.
That synthesizer is 25 years old, and the NAD remote control probably almost the same.
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instrument-a-day 26: optical siren
A perforated disk glued to an old cassette player motor interrupts ambient light and makes tones on a tiny optical diode connected to an amplifier.
instrument-a-day 25: thimbelon
(video link)
Just some metal thimbles in a row.
instrument-a-day 24: unpleasant reed pipe
A friend gave me an old mouthpiece (I think it’s from an alto saxophone). I made an adapter to attach it to the pipe from yesterday’s PVC membrane pipe.
You can download the design files for the adapter from www.thingiverse.com/thing:18089
This is way harder to play than the membrane pipe! It took all my breath to get a few honks out of it.