Precedent Library: Unique Instruments

PAPER ORGAN

Shaunta Butler

This organ is completely made of paper and cardboard, except of one transparent plastic side to view internals. Build process described here: http://only-paper.ru/forum/38-22814-1 - a couple of sketches for the valves and key levers model are placed there I'm not going to make a templates for this model, at least in the nearest future , because it is too hard to just print and assemble a working thing - pretty much tuning should be made for each pipe, even paper thickness is matters

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2019/09/paper-organ/

The Bamboo Ensemble Suc Song Moi

Shaunta Butler

Music from Bamboo, Music of Vietnam | The Bamboo Ensemble Suc Song Moi 

TEDx | 2017 | 12 mins


Listen to the beautiful sounds of Vietnam's only ensemble that performs its repertoire purely with bamboo music instruments.

1st song: Diễm Xưa | Trịnh Công Sơn
2nd song: Turkish March | Mozart

Suc Song Moi (The New Vitality) is the only bamboo ensemble in Vietnam that performs its symphonically orchestrated repertoire purely with bamboo music instruments. It was established in 2013 by the young conductor Dong Quang Vinh – the principle conductor of the Vietnam National Opera & Ballet & Hanoi Voices Choir, who had been trained for 9 years in Shanghai Conservatory of Music – China. The Ensemble’s music instruments were all made from bamboo by Artist Dong Van Minh (father of Dong Quang Vinh) – a prominent bamboo music maestro and its reperoire, includes Vietnamese folk music and world’s academic classical masterpieces by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Debussy, Ravel, Saint-Saens, Offenbach, Elgar etc., were all orchestrated by Dong Quang Vinh himself. Inherited the passion for academic music from his father, combined with the unfettered mind of a young professional, Vinh set up the Bamboo Ensemble with an ambition to bring academic music closer to the young generation in his unique and original style.

Angklung

Shaunta Butler

An Angklung Orchestra - Indonesia

Made by Film Australia 1975  | Directed by Brian Hannant | 6 mins


 An angklung is a Sundanese bamboo instrument which is rattled to produce a fixed note.  Originally tuned to the pentatonic scale, it was used in traditional music.  However, today it is usually tuned to the diatonic scale and Western style music is performed.  In this program the Bandung Conservatoire Orchestra demonstrates the complexity of the instrument and plays a well-known waltz.

Jarabi

Shaunta Butler

Jarabi -Sona Jobarteh 

BBC News Africa | 5 mins


Sona Jobarteh hails from a long West African tradition of Griots and kora players; her grandfather was the master Griot Amadu Bansang Jobarteh. Creating her own history, she has broken from the male-dominated kora tradition to become the family's first female virtuoso of the instrument. Here Sona Jobarteh performs the traditional Malian song, Jarabi, accompanied by Femi Temowo on guitar and percussionist Robert Fordjour.

Native American Instruments

Shaunta Butler

Native American Instruments

Ellen Fullman: 'Long String Instrument'

Shaunta Butler

Ellen Fullman: 'Long String Instrument'

Raw Footage | 9 min | 1984


Like Bertoia and Eastley, Fullman started out as a sculptor, gradually got interested in constructing sound-making objects, and finally graduated to instrument invention. She has dedicated much of her artistic life to the Long String Instrument, a physically imposing device with 53-foot-long strings that takes several days to set up in a performance space. Later incarnations of the Long String Instrument expanded to 100 foot strings. Unlike Mr and Mrs Lasry with the Cristal Baschet, Fulman doesn’t use water to keep her fingers slippery but coats both her hands and the strings with rosin. Waxed up, she strokes the strings between her fingertips, coaxing out gorgeous hovering tones as extended as the filaments themselves. The timbre sometimes recalls the viola or the church organ but the notes are so stretched out it feels almost like a synthesizer sound. In one interview, Fullman described playing the Long String Instrument as “an ecstatic feeling, a floating sensation. Music is bigger than me: there are pitch relationships, shapes of notes beautiful beyond the level of human expression. I like that feeling of being a conduit.” This enjoyably amateurish local news item from an Austin, Texas TV station also showcases another of Fullman’s inventions, a water-drip drum.

- Simon Reynolds

Kathy Hinde: Piano Migrations

Shaunta Butler

Kathy Hinde: Piano Migrations
Short Films | 5 min | 2010


Composer and visual artist Kathy Hinde merges digital technology and the natural environment in works like “Piano Migrations”, which exists somewhere between an installation and an instrument. Taking the interior of a battered old upright piano, Hinde used it as a screen on which to project video footage of birds landing on telegraph lines. Their movements are analysed by MaxMSP software, which activates little motors and solenoids attached to each string, resulting in a delicate clatter of tuned percussion. Check out also the YouTube clip for a related project, a Bird Sequencer that Hinde created in collaboration with Ivan Franco. Inspired by the same patterns of migratory birds landing on wires – which reminded Hinde of notes written on the stave of a musical score - this piece is less mechanical and more digital. Rather than the analogue vibrations of physically plucked strings situated in the same physical space as the listener, Bird Sequencer deploys samples sourced from a prepared piano, whose sound was altered using nuts and bolts and bits of rubber.

- Simon Reynolds

Sarah Angliss: The Ealing Feeder

Shaunta Butler

Sarah Angliss: The Ealing Feeder

Short Films | 2 min | 2013


Sarah Angliss describes herself as an automatist – a maker of musical automatons and sound-generating robots. She started making her own instruments not just because she wanted a unique palette of timbres for her recordings and concerts, but because she was looking for ways to mitigate the dullness of live electronic performance (typically a static figure hunched over a laptop). As well as diverting the eyes of the audience, machines like Angliss’s robotic ventriloquist dummy also give off a powerful aura of the uncanny, which fits well with her interest in magic, the supernatural, and British folklore. As seen in this clip, the Ealing Feeder is a mechanical carillon made out of 29 handbells, which can be programmed to chime in patterns much quicker and more intricate than any human player could manage. The name of the machine, incidentally, comes from a visit to the Battersea Power Station, in whose control room Angliss saw a lever, called the Ealing Feeder, that controlled the supply to the West London area. In addition to building her own contraptions, Angliss also repurposes existing inventions like the theremin, which she has adapted so that it can trigger samples of bird-song. You can hear that effect on “A Wren in the Cathedral,” a track off Angliss’s debut album Ealing Feeder, which was released last year and is highly recommended.

- Simon Reynolds

David Vorhaus Analogue Electronic Music

Shaunta Butler

David Vorhaus Analogue Electronic Music

Raw Footage | 7 min | 1978


David Vorhaus is a cult figure for his involvement in White Noise, whose captivating 1969 album of psychedelic musique concrete 'An Electric Storm' was made with BBC Radiophonic Workshop members Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson. But Vorhaus also had a long career making electronic library music and inventing instruments. This clip from the 1979 BBC program The New Sound of Music showcases two of his creations. The MANIAC – it stands for Multiphasic Analog Inter-Active Chromataphonic – is a complex sequencer that allows the composer to rearrange patterns, flip them inside out and upside down, and so forth. More striking looking is the Kaleidophon, a sort of synth-guitar that has ribbons of electrically conductive tape instead of strings. Touch-sensitive and with a subtlety of accent and nuance that the typical keyboard interface for synthesisers in the Seventies couldn’t supply, the Kaleidophon allowed for note-bending and glissandi. But just like the ill-fated Gizmo, the Kaleidophon was too tied to the prog rock criteria of early Seventies musicianship. As it turned out, electronic music’s immediate future would be far less expressive and virtuosic – all about one-finger synth-pop jingles and mechanistic sequencer patterns. The MANIAC was actually more attuned to the coming Eighties sound, its arpeggiated wibbles anticipating acid house and trance. Still, like the Gizmo, the sight of Vorhaus noodling away on his perpendicular Kaleidophon does make you fondly imagine an alternate history scenario for rock: a world where punk never happened (and neither did the Human League and Depeche Mode) and where every band features a lead Kaleidophonist wanking into the wind like nobody’s business.

- Simon Reynolds

The Anarchestra

Shaunta Butler

2015

The Anarchestra is set up as an interactive art installation that the public gets to play. It can be tuned all to the same key making it hard to hit the wrong notes. You don't have to be a good musician to play it.


Anarchestra INSTRUMENT PLAYLISThttps://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgRy08eqGTaORC4QH7QSOJD0rbinM6LEt