Dennis Havlena's musical instruments

Dennis Havlena has made a wide variety of homemade instruments. His website includes directions for making many of them.



[via Make]

Yuri Suzuki

[via We Make Money Not Art]

Yuri Suzuki recently earned an MA in Design Products program at the Royal College of Art.

The projects of his that caught my eye include Sound Chaser (which is a bit like a toy train that rides/plays rails of records, see above) and Prepared Turntable (a five-armed record player, see below).

Hydraulophones

A hydraulophones are musical instruments that uses pressurized hydraulic fluid, such as water, to make sound. They were invented by Steve Mann ( who is perhaps best known for his work in wearable computing). I particularly like the instrument's public art incarnation:


Pachelbel's Canon being played on the hydraulophone:


Overview of the instrument including early prototypes:


A variety of hydraulophone-related videos, photos, & links can be found at Steve Mann's wearcam website.

Phyllis Chen & her toy pianos

The other night I heard a fantastic performance by Phyllis Chen at the Christopher Henry Gallery on Elizabeth Street (NYC). It's amazing to see & hear virtuoso piano playing on the tiny keyboards. Each different toy piano seems to have its own unique characteristics, but overall they are more percussive than regular pianos.

Here's a video from the performance:

My hard drive is experiencing some strange noises

Gregory Chatonsky's project uses sensors to translate (using Pure Data) the vibrations from a malfunctioning hard drive into sound.

Musical tables

I'm gearing up to do a series of acoustic artworks and have been looking at what is out there. Golan Levin's Scrapple (2005) is quite cool:



Surprising similiar to Scrapple is the Reactable (see video below) which was developed at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. Since the two projects came out at almost the same time, it seems they the artist/developers simply came up with similar ideas independently, with a couple of notable differences.

Scrapple's table acts as a score and objects placed on it are interpreted into sound chronologically, whereas the Reactable is more amorphous in terms of how objects' sounds relate to time. Also, the Reactable has specific objects that are dedicated for generating or manipulating particular sounds, whereas Scrapple will interpret any object placed upon it (which seems particularly interesting to me). I suspect that the Reactable is more flexible in the sounds it can create, while Scrapple is more intuitive in its usage.