VIDEOS
In addition to the videos appearing below, I’ve set up a youtube playlist featuring short demonstrations of instruments from the instrumentarium. You can find it here.
IN BOSKY JANGLE
I built In Bosky Jangle (originally known as Sound Chamber) a few years ago for an exhibit in Bolinas, California, and it has appeared in several other places since then. It is a foresty-feeling kinetic soundspace of bell trees and other instruments. Visitors are invited to enter the forest and play.
HOW TO BUILD A DRIFTWOOD XYLOPHONE
Late afternoon at Drake’s Beach on Point Reyes. Joyce Kauffman joins me here, along with videographers David LaFontaine and Janine Warner, to show how to make a xylophone of driftwood.
BANDS AND BARS
A few years ago I built this unwieldy sound assemblage with the unifying principle that all of the sounding elements are bands or bars of steel which are fixed at one end and free to move at the other. Apologies for the haphazard quality of the video and editing: until the day I retrieve this instrument from storage and reassemble it, this is the only documentation of it that we have.
MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS EVERYWHERE: SOUND AND VIBRATIONS
Jim Metzner is the force behind a wonderful program called Kid’s Science Challenge, centered on an annual contest in which children submit entries for science projects, with a different theme each year. I helped him a few years ago when the challenge was to design a new musical instrument. This video, in which I talk about various sound-making ideas, was part of that year’s program. And of course we got submissions from lots of wonderful kids. You can see some of them here.
EXPLORING THE SCIENCE OF SOUND WITH INVENTED MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS
Here’s a talk and demonstration I gave as part of the Oakmont Sunday Symposium series at Oakmont Village, near Santa Rosa California , thanks to Philip Wigen and Dutch Lichliter. This is a more extensive discussion touching on various topics in acoustics. Looking back at it, I see that it suffers from one disconcerting problem: my tendency to talk too fast! … making it hard sometimes to decipher the words. That aside, there’s a lot of interesting stuff here.
AS COLD AS IT GETS, WITH SARA WINGE
This is my friend Sara singing the song “As Cold As It Gets”, written by Patty Griffiths. No weird instruments in this one (although I did build the somewhat unusual guitar that I play to accompany her). I just like the song and Sara’s delivery of it, so here it is.