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Odd Musical Instruments

OneWingedBird

OneWingedBird

Beloved of Ra
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Aug 3, 2003
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This page has really grabbed me, the sort of fascinating place where you can look at things that are not only weird and unusual but sound rather good too - and they have mp3s for most of the instruments.

The Gallery of Odd Musical Instruments

Some of the wackier entries there are:

The Rocket Launcher

The Theremin Cello

The Electronic Bagpipe

And a long standing favourite of mine:

The Waterphone

More on this amazing instrument at Richard Waters Waterphone homepage, including mp3s and several quicktime movies showing the instrument being played.


A few other good links in keeping with this theme are:

Obsolete.com's 120 years of electronic music

Cool and Strange Music Magazine

REsearch's Incredibly Strange Music Volume II

Theremin World
 
Great! tnx for the sites. I love things like this:D Here's one - not so weird but interesting: http://www.ehhs.cmich.edu/~dhavlena/

Several of my friends make instruments, Kif Douglas makes zithers,dulcimers and all sorts of string instruments, Med and Alison, who live near me make marimbas, didges and all sorts of drums from bongo size to bloody massive - and I mean that! a bass about 12ft or more long. Sadly their website is down at the mo' but I'll post it when the are up again(Alison has a baby due). They are called "Thelemic pulse" and have a theatre in penzance called The Visionary Art of Sound. Once saw a Sarrusaphone in a junk shop, but sadly didn't have enough cash to buy it:(
Another mate has a repro serpent which he played in the band for our miracle plays in St.Just
Maybe I should get them all together, now that would be something....
 
I always fancied a hurdy-gurdy, but they are hideously expensive.

Obsolete instruments are also fascinating, the slug-horn and serpent for example.

Carole
 
I've always wanted to be able to make musical instruments but I have no idea how you learn.
 
carole said:
I always fancied a hurdy-gurdy, but they are hideously expensive.
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A friend of mine plays these- he once won a car in a raffle, then sold it immediately to buy a hurdy-gurdy.

He also likes the fact the their cases look very much like children's coffins...
 
Does anyone remember the "musical instrument" in Terri Gilliams, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen? It was a torture instrument of strange description. Levers or peddles inflicted pain on people whose screams were different notes, so it produced tunes with varying degrees of screams.
Strange.
 
Give me a Tromba Marina any day, its only got one string so I might be able to play it!
 
Does anyone remember the "musical instrument" in Terri Gilliams, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen?
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Ah yes, "I call this one The Torturer's Apprentice" Yeeek Arrgh Oooh...
 
One of my faves is the racket, so much tube in such a handy space.! And those double reeds certainly do produce a real racket, no doubt where the expression came from.:D
Early portative organs are pretty impressive also having double reeds, however I wouldn't fancy the sound of the Hydraulus if I was a christian!
 
The Trautonium

Another interesting instrument from the 1930s, the trautonium, apparently best known for its use on the soundtrack of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds:

The Trautonium (1930)

The Trautonium was developed by the electrical engineer Dr Freidrich Adolf Trautwein (b Würzburg 1888, Germany; d Düsseldorf 1956) and first exhibited in Germany in 1930. The domestic version of the Trautonium was manufactured and marketed by Telefunken between 1932 and 1935. A number of composers wrote works for the instrument including Paul Hindemith who learnt to play the Trautonium and produced a 'Concertina for Trautonium and Orchestra' as well as Höffer, Genzmer, Julius Weismann and most notably Oskar Sala who became a virtuoso on the machine and eventually took over the development of the Trautonium producing his own variations- the 'Mixtur-Trautonium', The 'Concert-Trautonium' and the 'Radio - Trautonium'. Oskar Sala has continued to work with the Trautonium to the present day. Trautwein also produced an 'Amplified Harpsichord'(1936) and 'Electronic Bells'(1947), after the second world war Trautwein worked in Paris on aviation research and then set up a school for recording engineers in Düsseldorf (1950), Trautwein produced his last instrument the 'Elektronische Monochord' in 1952.

A very early model of the Trautonium with pedal board and loudspeaker c1930 The Original Trautonium had a fingerboard consisting of a resistance wire stretched over a metal rail marked with a chromatic scale and coupled to a neon tube oscillator. The performer on pressing the wire touches the rail and completes the circuit and the oscillator is amplified via a loudspeaker. The position of the finger on the wire determines the resistance controlling the frequency and therefore controls the pitch of the oscillator. The Trautonium had a three octave range that could be transposed by means of a switch. An additional series of circuits can be added to control the timbre of the note by amplifying the harmonics of the fundamental note, non harmonic partials can also be added by selective filtering. This unique form of subtractive synthesis produced a tone that was distinctive and unusual when compared to the usual heterodyning valve instruments of the 1920-30's. The foot pedal of the machine controlled the overall volume.

From Obsolete.com.

An enthusiast of this instrument runs trautonium.com which has pictures of his trautonium 2000, built to more or less original specifications using modern technology.

Another modern version of the instrument appears here, though strictly speaking this is a more complex mixturtrautonium, and also at analog-synth.de, with some info on construction and schematics.

German synth manufacturer Doepfer seem to be the only people offering the trautonium in kit form, as an adaptation of their modular systems, with lots of technical information and pictures here
 
Once played a jazz concert sharing the bill with an old, black blues player called Jessie Fuller. He was a complete one man band, absolutely amazing! All at the same time he played 12 string steel guitar, harmonica on a brace, with his left foot, a choke cymbal and with his right, his custom built bass accompaniment. This was a series of piano bass strings on an upright frame with pedals to sound them. I think he also had a washboard somewhere as well! Hardly wizard technology, but absolutely amazing to hear.;)
 
If anyone fancies a gander at some odd musical instruments,i would recommend the Horniman Collection in London ;)
 
A pretty idea. I like it nearly as much as the avant-garde piece where a string quartet gathered around a tank of goldfish with the staves drawn on the sides and translated the movements of the fish into sounds.

Not sure if I'd enjoy actually listening to it though. :?

allheadlinenews.com/articles/7002793103
LInk is dead. The MIA webpage (quoted in full below) can be accessed via the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20060425104334/http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7002793103

Swedish Orchestra Plays Ice Instruments

March 15, 2006 3:21 p.m. EST

Ayinde O. Chase - All Headline News Staff Writer

Miami, FL (AHN) - A Swedish orchestra playing unusual instruments carved out of ice had to cut a short a performance when a flute began to melt.

Instrument maker Tim Linharts, has been able to transform frozen water into functioning flutes, violins, and a double bass out of ice.

The instruments were played for the first time at a concert in a gigantic igloo that was deemed a complete success aside from the early melting of the flute.

Linharts says, "Next time I will keep ten ice flutes at hand in case it happens again."

According to Linharts, the musicians will keep their instruments in the deep freeze and only take them out to practice or to perform.
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Wintergatan's marvelous marble music machine ...

 
A bit more weird and wonderful musical machine madness from Mr Wintegaten ..

 
Swifty said:
Wintergatan's marvelous marble music machine ...

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Just over a year later, mad scientist Mr Wintergaden graciously reacts to fan submitted covers of his marble machine .. :cool:

 
brianellwood said:
Once played a jazz concert sharing the bill with an old, black blues player called Jessie Fuller. He was a complete one man band, absolutely amazing! All at the same time he played 12 string steel guitar, harmonica on a brace, with his left foot, a choke cymbal and with his right, his custom built bass accompaniment. This was a series of piano bass strings on an upright frame with pedals to sound them. I think he also had a washboard somewhere as well! Hardly wizard technology, but absolutely amazing to hear.
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Here's a photo of Jessie Fuller with his hardware setup ...

JesseFuller.jpg

​
 
Here's an avant garde / home-built musical apparatus nobody asked for - the Furby Organ! :nails:

Musician wires 44 toys into 'Furby Organ'
A British inventor posted a video showing how he transformed nearly 50 Furby toys into a combination musical instrument and nightmare engine.

Sam Battle posted a video to his Look Mum No Computer channel on YouTube showing how he wired 44 Furbies into a keyboard to create a "Furby Organ." ...
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It's never too early to nurture your unborn child's interest in music.

Inventors unveil musical instrument for unborn babies
A pair of Canadian music researchers developed a wearable electronic device for pregnant women that they dubbed the "world's first prenatal musical instrument."

Aura Pon, who received her PhD in music technology this month from the University of Calgary, and colleague Johnty Wang, who is working on a PhD in music technology at McGill University, unveiled the Womba, a device that is strapped across a pregnant woman's stomach to translate her fetus' kicks and other movements into music.

Pon said she first conceived of the Womba when she was pregnant with her first child in 2013.

"I thought it would be kind of fun to have him make sound," Pon told CTV News. "I'm always interested in different ways you can interact with sound and music."

The first version of the instrument was very basic, Pon said.

"The first version of the Womba was, essentially, just sensors taped to my belly which were set up to trigger sounds on a church organ," she told the University of Calgary's UToday.

"The location of certain kicks would set off certain chords," Pon said. "As far as being a bonding tool, I'll tell you that it was pretty amazing to be able to hear my baby making these sounds. It was magical." ...
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SOURCE: https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2018/0...?utm_source=sec&utm_campaign=sl&utm_medium=11
 
EnolaGaia said:
Here's an avant garde / home-built musical apparatus nobody asked for - the Furby Organ! :nails:



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Kind of a modern, cruelty-free take on Athanasius Kircher's Katzenklavier

Odd musical instruments? How about the Tromba Marina - a huge one-stringed triangle played using harmonics.

There are a lot of videos on youtube but I'm not convinced it's being played right in all of them. It's used to create a disconcerting, low metallic buzzing in several:


No video here but I suspect it's the thing that sounds like a trumpet here, thus showing itself to be a 'real' instrument with range and not just a novelty.

 
The woodcut of the Tromba Marina was an image I encountered as a plate in Percy Scholes's Oxford Companion to Music.

I loved it so much that I used it as the splash-screen for the Cat-Organ - Catalogue-Organizer, an atrociously complex and unsuccessful piece of software for creating classical catalogues of one's records. I figured the original cat-piano graphic might offend some purchasers.

Powerful, yes but user-friendly, it was not. :oops:
 
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