Unusual Instruments

I guess anyone who reads this knows about my website, The Virtual Museum of Music Inventions. At first, I wasn't terribly interested in having students do this project because I wanted them to have as many musical experiences as possible and making an instrument is pretty far down on that list. Eventually, I cottoned to the idea and I positively enjoyed teaching the students about the parameters of what goes into creating a sound: vibration, resonance, timbre, pitch, etc. After all, in college I took a semester class in "Acoustics". Before that, I tested laboratory rats for my psychology class to see what their pitch thresholds were.
Fundamentally, though, I've always been interested in new ways of making sound. Recently, I remembered some childhood experiences along that line:

• I used to have fun making a shrill whistle from two blades of grass, holding them in the middle of an opening of my cupped hands.
• We used to bang silverware and glasses to make rhythms at the table after dinner.
• At camp, there was a counselor who had made a beautiful set of chimes from brake drums. He played them in the outdoor chapel, in a grove of trees by the lake, as we watched the sun set.
• This same guy played the saw! He held one end of a large saw on his knee and used an actual violin bow to create the sound. He bent the saw very hard to get high notes and he bent it softly it get low notes.

All through my life, I've been interested in world instruments: taiko, gamelan, conga drums, flutes of different types, including an old double flute my parents brought back from Romania, koto, samisen, shakuhachi, harps, alp horns. . . you name it!

I even enjoyed John Cage's notion of "ambient" music, where you focus in on the sounds you hear right now . . . in the same way you listen to music. In this case, your own brain is the organizing factor, or not.