moonmilk

homemade musical instruments

instrument-a-day 9: hmmmmFebruary 9th, 2012

A variation on yesterday’s bzzz. A bit better, but I still want more!

instrument-a-day 8: bzzzzzzFebruary 9th, 2012

This is a not very successful experiment with translating live video into sound. I’m gonna keep messing with it, though, until it turns into something interesting.

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instrument-a-day 7: speak and play!February 8th, 2012

(link to video)

Speak and Play! is a speech synthesizer for pianists. It has two parts: a score generator that turns written English text into musical scores, and a sample set (hurriedly constructed from my own voice) which, when used to play the scores, approximately recreates the original text.

Thanks to pianist Margaret Leng Tan for making Speak and Play! speak and play, and for coming up with the name!

More details below…

The synthesizer is a soundfont made in a hurry from samples of my own voice, and the score generator uses the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary to guess the pronunciation of written texts, and Lilypond to engrave the score. It took a few hours and a chicken parmigiana sandwich to get it working. It’s not ready for the public yet, but if you’d like to try it, get in touch.

I counted the number of uses of each phoneme in the dictionary’s 133,000 or so words with 850,000 phonemes, so I could put the most popular sounds close together to reduce the amount of octave hopping. Here’s the top ten phonemes in English:

AH 70922 8% N 60394 7% IH 49759 5% S 49639 5% L 49333 5% T 48459 5% R 45884 5% K 42471 4% IY 34461 4% D 32352 3%

Here’s the score for “Hello! We love toy pianos!” as used in the video:

Once you have an instrument that plays your own voice, you can mess around with it like this:

(link)

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instrument-a-day 6: acrylic slide whistleFebruary 7th, 2012

a slide whistle made from some scraps of acrylic tube and rod, and lubricated with olive oil.

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instrument-a-day 5: brass free reedsFebruary 5th, 2012

Primitive accordion-style free reeds, made from basswood and strips of brass. They take a LOT of wind to play – I almost passed out while recording the soundtrack. I also broke one of them, so I tapped and scraped on the reed instead of blowing it.

They have a nice deep tone with a lot of promise, so I hope to work with this technique more. I used this reference while building them.

I didn’t manage to record any video, so the demo video is pretty bland.

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instrument-a-day 4: printed panpipesFebruary 5th, 2012

I designed some panflute-like whistles and printed them on a Makerbot. They’re disappointing – hard to play, and pathetic sounds. But you can download the design files and improve them for me! www.thingiverse.com/thing:17020 and www.thingiverse.com/thing:17023

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instrument-a-day 3: good old wooden whistleFebruary 3rd, 2012

Sometimes the old classics are the best.

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instrument-a-day 2: tiny combustionFebruary 2nd, 2012

The tiny sounds of a burning match.

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instrument-a-day 1: westminster doorbellFebruary 1st, 2012

Day 1: the Westminster Doorbell, made of a couple of steel rods suspended over a guitar pickup. I’m learning how to get more overtones out of it, but I haven’t really figured it out yet.

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instrument-a-day starts tomorrow!January 31st, 2012

On February 1 I’m embarking on my yearly endeavor to make a new handmade instrument every single day of the month. This will be the fifth year I’ve done this — you can see the results of the previous years here or on flickr. As usual, I’m trying not to plan ahead at all – I have no idea what I’ll make tomorrow.

Here’s a video with highlights from several years of noisy noises:

28 noisy noises from ranjit on Vimeo.

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meet the JelTone!July 9th, 2011

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:

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