I think the membrane pipe is a relatively recent invention. I’m not sure who came up with it, but there’s a lot of nice examples on youtube. Here’s a how-to video. I should have watched that video before making this thing, which is my first attempt at a membrane pipe.
I didn’t make any effort to tune it – I just drilled holes approximately where my fingers could reach, and that not very accurately. You can see my hands straining in the video.
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I have the chimes from a toy piano, but no keyboard. This is a sketch of an idea for an all wood keyboard where the keys and hammers rotate on integral fulcrums rather than on a metal shaft.
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My favorite form of circuit bending, because it’s the easiest, is what I call circuit starving: stick a potentiometer into the battery connection so you can turn down the voltage until the circuit has just barely enough power to work. That’s where interesting stuff starts to happen.
You don’t need to open the toy’s case, solder, or cut anything for circuit starving. Make a sandwich with a piece of paper between two scraps of aluminum foil attached to the leads of the potentiometer. Insert it between one of the batteries and its spring contact, and the potentiometer becomes part of the power circuit. Then you can tweak the pot, in very tiny increments, until the weirdness happens.
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Warning: LOUD!
I’ve been wanting to try this since I met Cracked Ray Tube at the Guthman Competition last week. All the sounds come from internal noise and feedback in the mixer, with a bit of tweaking from the onboard effects.
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I made a trumpet marine, or tromba marina from a maple beam, a cello string, a leftover bridge from the 8-bit violin, and a styrofoam cooler as the resonating body. This one’s a bit fancier than the one I made during instrument-a-day 2008.
The tromba marina is fingered below the bow, creating harmonics by lightly touching the string at the nodes. (I tied little bits of thread at the nodal points to make it easier for me to find them.) The bridge is unbalanced so that it vibrates and rattles against the body, making a buzzing sound. It’s an amazingly weird instrument. I love it, but I can’t really play it.
(Here’s a youtube video of a performance with a real Tromba Marina.)
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When I fly into LaGuardia, as I did this afternoon, I try to sit by a right-side window to get this view. And then I take the video and apply optical flow techniques and send the trail to the drone from day 13.
I took two JelTones to the Guthman Musical Instrument Competition. I didn’t make the instruments today, but I did make and carve a lot of jello.
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I designed the 8-bit violin during last year’s instrument-a-day. I ended up donating violin 0x01 to Flux Factory’s fundraising auction. I made this one, pretty much identical to the first, for and with the help of violinist Patti Kilroy, who tried it out for this video. This is the first time she’s played the finished violin!
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plucking the reeds from the guts of an accordion.