“You’re going to have a house, and the house makes music. When you get here, you’ll figure it out.”
That is more or less accurate, as far as it goes, though it clearly falls short as a practical description. “The Music Box,” the project of which this tower is a part, is one of those things that requires a hyphen or a compound word to describe; Delaney Martin, its curator, calls it “a shantytown-sound laboratory.”
In more literal terms, it is a collection of tumbledown wooden and metal structures built on the site, and almost entirely from the remains of a late-18th-century Creole cottage that collapsed a couple of years ago here in the historic, bohemian Bywater neighborhood.
Each structure houses an instrument, or two or three. In some cases the structures are musical instruments themselves. There is the thatched-roof hut that is home to an elaborate arrangement of Balinese vibraphones, the shack with amplified floorboards, the rusty spiral staircase that is also a foot-operated pipe organ and the little glass house containing what looks like a giant, bell-lined hoop skirt. They are all clustered together on the narrow lot, like the stage set of a fairy tale that takes place in a junkyard.
Here’s a teaser video of the New Orleans Airlift’s Music Box Orchestra, a big crazy sound art/architecture project I helped out with. My contribution was the squeaky moving floor, which you can see providing the bass line as the performance starts.
A selection of my prints from the greenmarket produce scan series – ranging in size from 3 inches to 5 feet! – will be in the (Un)Still Life show at BPL’s Central Library at Grand Army Plaza, opening tomorrow! The show will be up through December 3.
Many of the fruits and vegetables I use in my images came from the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket, just a few steps from the library, so it’s especially nice to see them in the beautiful lobby gallery there.
Over at NYC Resistor, we put together a little team to enter the Jello Mold Competition at Gowanus Studio Space. The team members were me, Astrida Valigorsky, Mimi Hui, and Catarina Mota. After a false start or two, we ended up making a working toy piano out of jello (and some electronics). The Resistor JelTone tied for the Creativity Prize, and you can see it in the videos below.
That same weekend, I took some of my homemade instruments, including the 8-bit violin and a second JelTone (built in haste at the last possible minute), to the Solid Sound Music Festival for the CDM/Moog Handmade Lounge. After all my jello melted, on the second day of the festival I rebuilt the JelTone with fruit salad instead, and here it is:
I always liked the sounds I got while washing big steel bowls.
Trivia: the musical instrument called the Waterphone does contain water, but is named for its inventor, Richard Waters.
This trick was used as far back as the 19th century to synthesize musical tones. The gears have 24, 27, 30, 32, 36, 40, 45, and 48 teeth, so the notes are all related by simple fractions – that makes this a just intonation scale rather than equal temperament.
There's plans and instructions on thingiverse: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6662
A working violin made from maple and oak craft wood. The design is all 90 degree angles except the fingerboard. The tuning pegs are literally square pegs in round holes.
The thing's tuned two half-steps low until it gets used to the tension.
I have never played a violin, so many thanks to Bre Pettis who dusted off his 15-years-neglected fiddling skills to test-drive this violin! (Hey NYC violinists! Want to help test & demo this thing? Contact me.)
I hope to get all the designs uploaded to thingiverse soon – keep an eye on moonmilk.com if you're interested.
Warning: include(/home/ranjit/moonmilk.com/pb/wp-style.php) [function.include]: failed to open stream: Permission denied in /home/moonmilk/moonmilk.com/pb/wp-content/themes/blix-091/footer.php on line 12
Warning: include() [function.include]: Failed opening '/home/ranjit/moonmilk.com/pb/wp-style.php' for inclusion (include_path='.:/usr/local/lib/php:/usr/local/php5/lib/pear') in /home/moonmilk/moonmilk.com/pb/wp-content/themes/blix-091/footer.php on line 12
