TIN WITH TINES

This lamellaphone is made in an old style sometimes seen in instruments from Burkina Faso and nearby, employing a ready-made tin body topped with a board too thick and rigid to be called a soundboard. The tin itself (in this case an old cookie tin), aided by the resonance of the enclosed air, does a good-enough job of projecting the sound. In a sense there’s nothing very special about the particular instrument shown here — it’s just a not-great Yankee replication of a beautiful African design. But I’ve included it here because it has one very sweet quality I’d like you to hear in the sound clip: the back of the tin is thin and flimsy enough that you can modulate its resonant qualities by pressing with a finger as you play, producing a lovely and expressive waffling of the tone. The tines, by the way, are shaped and hardened by hand-forging (that is, cold-hammering) from soft steel wire.

In the audio clip, Tin with Tines is accompanied by of blown bottles.