This article is about the different ways one can think about musical scales and the logic that underlies them. For any given scale you could ask, how were the particular pitches of this scale selected from the continuum? What sort of reasoning underlies the choices?...

Some time ago I gathered a set of stainless steel drinking water bottles, tuned them by adding suitable amounts of water, and hung them on a frame for playing by percussion. They were the kind of water bottle that has an inner and an outer shell for insulation. These...

What happens when two or more musical strings are connected to one another? There are many ways that this idea can play out, and in this article we’ll look at some of the possibilities. The musical results can sometimes be quite interesting! You can  see a version of...

Pianos are complicated pieces of machinery. Contemporary pianos have literally thousands of moving parts; it’s mind-blowing when you think about it. And it’s amazing how well the design works: the resulting instrument is fluid, expressive, dependable, extraordinarily...

If you have fooled around with the making of pitched percussion instruments from available materials, perhaps you’ve encountered this situation. You find something that produces a nice tone when you strike it – let’s say, a length of steel conduit which you’ve...

For the last decade I’ve been serving as one of the curators at a the Window Gallery, an exhibit space for new instruments and sound art. It’s a project of the Center for New Music in San Francisco, housed in the Center’s location in San Francisco’s Tenderloin...

Most musical instruments have a primary vibrating body that serves as the main determinant of the frequencies we hear – think of the string itself in a string instrument, or the bar in a marimba. And then, most of those instruments have additional components which...

This essay is designed to accompany a video called Membrane Reeds which can be viewed here on Youtube. In it you can see and hear a variety of membrane reed instruments, but the video doesn’t go into much detail on how to build the instruments, nor does it address the...

Some time ago I posted on this site an essay under the title “Orientation of the Oscillation.”  In it I talked about the importance of the direction of the oscillation in an instrument’s main vibrating bodies (strings, bars, tines or whatever): how the orientation of...

What-a-Shame is the name of a musical instrument I designed long ago, and this article tells you what you need to know to build it. The article is not a step-by-step how-to; rather it outlines the underlying ideas and provides the necessary information while leaving...

Around the same time this article was posted, I uploaded this Youtube video showing in action the sound instrument called Wood & Butter. The video doesn’t include descriptions of or additional information about the instrument. That’s the purpose of this article:...

Most musical instruments are designed to work with one or the other of two types of vibratory movement: transverse or longitudinal. Very Loosely speaking, transverse vibration typically involves cross-wise movements in the vibratory medium; it is what we normally see...

Simple home-buildable music machines.

An exploration of the sonic world of scrape, and description of a battery of scraped instruments analogous to drum set.

The components in the photo on this page make up a musical instrument called the Speaker Driver Instrument. The elements of it, you can see, are an inexpensive little electronic keyboard, a stereo amplifier, a speaker driver minus its speaker cone, and a scrap of...

Hooray for through-and-through originality: It’s wonderful when a newly conceived musical instrument presents a whole new musical landscape to explore.  On the other hand, there’s also value in presenting a new instrument idea with at least some familiar elements –...

In this post you’ll find a description of a potentially very interesting idea in string instrument design.  But as you’ll see as you near the end of the post, my attempt to exploit the idea wasn’t terribly successful. Still, it’s an interesting enough concept to...

A melodic friction drum set

A video featuring an ostinato machine and lots of animation.

Perfectionism in music-making brings exquisite music into the world. But un-perfectionism brings another sort of richness.

The second of two articles on making and tuning simple disk gongs. This one describes an approach to tuning that is more sophisticated than the rudimentary approach described in the first article, and addresses the underlying acoustics more than the previous one.

Depictions of apparatus created in the late 19th century for experimentation and demonstrations in musical acoustics.

With many new instruments it’s both more fun and more musically fruitful not to try to become a virtuoso, but rather to keep an exploratory attitude that lets the instrument take you where it will.

Notes on the Over-Under scales, on a complementary pair of just scales used in a couple of recent instruments.

Notes on the question of patenting for new instruments. (Is it worth it?)

What is it about some sounds that gives them clear pitch, while other sounds come across as pitchless noise?

As a matter of effective design, for some types of instruments it’s worth thinking about the direction of excitation and the orientation of the resulting vibration.

When oscillating systems go nonlinear …

Artifice or Nature?

Looking for meaningful harmonic and melodic relationships in the overtone relationships inherent in different sounds, both harmonic and inharmonic.