moonmilk » instruments

instrument-a-day 10: frog

ranjit — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 06:54:40 +0000

A 3d-printed version of those carved wooden croaking frogs.

Download the files to make your own here: www.thingiverse.com/thing:17385

instrument-a-day 9: hmmmm

ranjit — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 23:46:05 +0000

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

instrument-a-day 8: bzzzzzz

ranjit — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 04:43:10 +0000

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.

instrument-a-day 7: speak and play!

ranjit — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 04:45:07 +0000

(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)

instrument-a-day 6: acrylic slide whistle

ranjit — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 04:34:55 +0000

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

instrument-a-day 5: brass free reeds

ranjit — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 03:58:46 +0000

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.

instrument-a-day 4: printed panpipes

ranjit — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 04:47:14 +0000

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

instrument-a-day 3: good old wooden whistle

ranjit — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:32:56 +0000

Sometimes the old classics are the best.

instrument-a-day 2: tiny combustion

ranjit — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 03:50:51 +0000

The tiny sounds of a burning match.

instrument-a-day 1: westminster doorbell

ranjit — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 03:41:26 +0000

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.

instrument-a-day starts tomorrow!

ranjit — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 03:20:50 +0000

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.

meet the JelTone!

ranjit — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 04:20:55 +0000

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:

8-bit violin played by real fiddlers!

ranjit — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 16:43:41 +0000

These guys at the Thingamajigs DIY Instruments Tailgate Party really know how to operate a pointy rectangular fiddle!

Thanks, CTP, for the videos.

8-bit violin plans

ranjit — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 23:27:27 +0000

8-bit violin plans, originally uploaded by ranjit.

Plans and instructions for the 8-bit violin are now on thingiverse!
thingiverse.com/thing:6912

instrument-a-day 28: sproing!

ranjit — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 04:04:43 +0000

sproing!!!

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instrument-a-day 27: bent buddha box beat

ranjit — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 21:44:54 +0000

a little oscillator that triggers the box to switch to another chant over and over again.

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instrument-a-day 26: bent buddha box

ranjit — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 20:57:05 +0000

Du Yun brought me this box from Shanghai, and I opened it up for a minor lobotomy.

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instrument-a-day 25: water bowl

ranjit — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 02:29:16 +0000

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.

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instrument-a-day 24: handmade electronic noise

ranjit — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 05:34:45 +0000

squeaky exercises from the pages of the book "Handmade Electronic Music" by Nic Collins.

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instrument-a-day 23: mechanical synthesizer

ranjit — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 00:44:33 +0000

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

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instrument-a-day 22: baseball chimes

ranjit — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 21:26:47 +0000

In honor of the start of spring training and in the hope that spring weather will be here soon.

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instrument-a-day 20 & 21: 8-bit violin

ranjit — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 06:33:06 +0000

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.

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instrument-a-day 19: brass whistle

ranjit — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 05:34:27 +0000

Yeah, I like whistles. This one's made from a brass tube and a wooden dowel from a craft store. The fipple was cut with a hacksaw, and the finger holes drilled with a drill press.

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instrument-a-day 18: garbage drainpipe

ranjit — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 05:41:38 +0000

Someone left a big chunk of gutter drain pipe in the garbage, and a sturdy wooden handle, just for me.

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instrument-a-day 17: wooden strings & rattles

ranjit — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 05:22:13 +0000

I lasercut some strips of poplar for another project, and found that the waste wood could be plucked like guitar strings. The strips make pretty good rattles too.

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instrument-a-day 16: light sensor

ranjit — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 04:50:35 +0000

It's just a photodiode, a 9-volt battery, and a little amplifier, but it makes the vibrations in artificial light audible. A lot of what you hear is derived from 60Hz AC power, but electronic displays have tones of their own.

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instrument-a-day 15: piano scanner

ranjit — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 21:24:44 +0000

Scanning a handheld magnetic pickup back and forth over the piano strings makes a pretty neat sound. I may try attaching a rail on which the pickup can slide back and forth.

The pickup is plugged into an ordinary guitar amp.

Plug: Fun with Sensors workshop this Saturday at NYC Resistor!

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instrument-a-day 14: corn music

ranjit — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 00:29:22 +0000

I’ve always thought the patterns on corncobs looked like player piano rolls. So I wrote a program that watches a slowly-turning corncob. Whenever a particularly dark kernel crosses the centerline of the image, it plays a note corresponding to the height.

You can download the Processing code from moonmilk.com/11/02/cornscan.txt.

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instrument-a-day 13: garbage garbage can lid

ranjit — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 23:10:35 +0000

On the way to SHARE last night, I
packed a contact microphone and drumsticks but no instrument, telling
myself I’d find something in the garbage on the way there. What I
found was this nice metal garbage can lid.

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instrument-a-day 12: failed box xylophone

ranjit — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 03:06:51 +0000

It doesn’t really work. I put it into the scrap wood bin.

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instrument-a-day 11: ice smash!

ranjit — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 03:59:30 +0000

Found a beautiful cracked frozen puddle in the park and flung some ice around.

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instrument-a-day 10: fish whistle

ranjit — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 04:36:11 +0000

Practice for Saturday’s laser whistle workshop. It’s cut from 1/4″ poplar. I won’t post the cutting plan until I figure out why only one of its two whistles is hooting and fix the problem!

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instrument-a-day 9: MIDI OUT

ranjit — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 23:02:23 +0000

The simplest possible midi instrument: just jam the speaker cable into the midi out connector.

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instrument-a-day 8: trash piano replacement hammers

ranjit — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 05:54:03 +0000

NYCResistor rescued a battered old upright piano that was destined for
the dumpster. There were 6 missing hammers right in the middle, so I
made a quick and dirty set of replacements. Surprisingly, they have a
sound that’s pretty close to the original hammers.

The hammers are lasercut from 1/4" poplar, glued together in
pairs to be 1/2" thick and then sanded down to 0.4" to match
the original hammers. The extended slot in the bottom allows me to
glue the hammer onto the old broken shafts instead of replacing them,
and to tilt them to the right to hit the strings at the right angle.
The felt is some wool stuff from a craft drawer. Real hammer heads
are mostly felt, but I made these ones mostly wood because it was
easier.

Plans and instructions at www.thingiverse.com/thing:6242

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instrument-a-day 7: makerbot

ranjit — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 05:33:16 +0000

I’ve always loved the sounds made by makerbots as they print out
little plastic gewgaws. Tonight I miked up Jeff’s custom crystal
Thing-o-matic as it printed out a shot glass. Acoustic mic is panned
left, and contact mic is panned right.

I know people have programmed their makerbots to play music, but I
like best the sounds they naturally make when they make objects.

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instrument-a-day 6: humidifier

ranjit — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 06:17:36 +0000

This humidifier runs next to my bed all night in the winter.
Sometimes its groans and whirs are so interesting that they keep me
awake and I have to turn it off. It plays little cadences, drones,
and repeating beats that constantly change. Or I’m just hallucinating
in my half-asleep state.

I’ve been meaning to record it for months. It didn’t do anything
particularly exciting during these 45 seconds, but you can hear it
subtly change even in that time.

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instrument-a-day 5: roundrect ocarina

ranjit — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 01:20:32 +0000

An improvised ocarina design, laser-cut and assembled from
cross-sections. It’s much less ergonomic but easier to assemble than
last year’s laser ocarina.

Plans and instructions are on thingiverse: www.thingiverse.com/thing:6182

p.s. I’m teaching a laser whistle workshop this Saturday in Brooklyn!

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instrument-a-day 4: glass feedback

ranjit — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 03:59:26 +0000

A piezo microphone and a piezo speaker hooked up to a little amplifier
to create feedback through a sheet of glass.

CAUTION: LOUD AND UNPLEASANT NOISE!

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instrument-a-day 3: drumstick whistles

ranjit — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 02:23:38 +0000

I believe in multiple-use instruments, so I turned the drumsticks from my Rock Band video game into whistles.

Materials: drumsticks, wooden dowels, wood glue.

Plus a bonus sound for today–crunching through snow with a crispy crust of ice:

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instrument-a-day 2: refrigophone

ranjit — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 05:34:45 +0000

For all four years of the instrument-a-day project, my noisy
refrigerator has plagued me: I have to unplug it whenever I record a
new instrument at home. Well, today I exploited it.

Materials: refrigerator noise, filtered by resonant tin cans.

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instrument-a-day 1: lumpy guitar

ranjit — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 06:03:15 +0000

To warm up for this year's month of making an instrument a day, and to advertise the junk guitar workshop this saturday: an especially primitive junk guitar.

Found wood, guitar strings, zither pins, scrap acrylic bridges, and a weird overhead pickup made of crudely-wound wire and a magnet out of a dead hard drive.

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ebassoon demo

ranjit — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 15:43:47 +0000

ebassoon demo, originally uploaded by ranjit.

Playing around with the ebassoon, which uses a simple network of dividers to derive a just-intonation scale from a single master tone.

moveable in seattle april 2

ranjit — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 05:27:25 +0000

I’m building a piano-tickling machine for Zachary James Watkins’ piece “Moveable,” which pianist Tiffany Lin will premiere in Seattle on April 2. More info within.

Moveable, long commutes between loved ones, music for motors and resonant strings

Friday April 2nd, 2010 8PM
Performance by pianist Tiffany Lin of a new evening length composition scored for retuned piano and a new mechanical extension called the Piano Monster built by NYC artist Ranjit Bhatnagar that uses 16 MIDI triggered voltage controlled motors with attached objects that resonate piano strings.

Wayward Music Series

The Chapel Performance Space at the Good Shepherd Center

4649 Sunnyside Avenue N., 4th Floor, Seattle, Washington

Tickets: Suggested Scale $5-$15

Tickets will be available at the door on the evening of the performance.

Moveable, long commutes between loved ones, music for motors and resonant strings is the elusive yet evocative title for the new composition by bay area composer Zachary James Watkins. This new evening length work is scored for retuned piano and a new mechanical extension called the Piano Monster built by NYC artist Ranjit Bhatnagar that uses 16 MIDI triggered voltage controlled motors with attached objects that resonate piano strings. The April 2nd premiere performance by pianist Tiffany Lin is presented by Nonsequitur as part of the Wayward Music Series at Seattle’s Chapel Performance Space. The title can be read many ways. Literal interpretations evoke the daily reality of so many modern day workers who must travel long distances to reach the work place or the distances traveled when in love. This title also touches upon the collaborative process between three artists who reside on two coasts and separated by thousands of miles. Trust, vulnerability and the creation of rich new works drive collaborations along distances. In our every day lives, the harmonic series is the fundamental building block of all sounds in constant collision transformed creating language, noise, and the plethora of instrumental timbres, which shape our aural, cultural and sensual experience. Moveable, long commutes between loved ones, music for motors and resonant strings celebrates diverse sounds combining electrical current hum, pure intonation, equal temperament and percussive noises into a vibrant sonic tapestry creating new imaginative narratives.

closing doors at nycemf march 25

ranjit — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 05:19:24 +0000

I presented my piece “Closing Doors” for robot toy piano at the NYC Electro-Acoustic Music Festival last week. It sounded something like this:
Download audio file (closing-doors.mp3)
(download)

Previously with robot toy piano…

Noisy noises video

ranjit — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 21:10:19 +0000

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instrument-a-day 28: Baba Yaga’s Balalaika

ranjit — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 19:26:31 +0000

It's made from a wooden mortar and pestle and some scraps of guitar string. I strapped a rechargable battery to my thumb to use as a slide, just like Baba Yaga used to do.

That's it for instrument-a-day for this year, but Jason, Chris and I will be performing with some of these instruments on Wednesday at Barbes in Brooklyn.

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28 more noisy noises at barbes, march 3

ranjit — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 19:19:45 +0000

28 MORE Noisy Noises, originally uploaded by ranjit.

A performance with handmade instruments at Barbès in Brooklyn, Wednesday March 3, 2010 at 8pm.

Like last year, I’ll be joined by Jason and Chris of the Glass Bees!

instrument-a-day 27: clock gongs

ranjit — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 03:33:36 +0000

I collected a bunch of old clock gongs, bells, and chimes from ebay.

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instrument-a-day 26: tick-tock metronome

ranjit — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 03:13:26 +0000

Metronome, wire, and two circuit-bent pocket voice recorders named "tick" and "tock".

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instrument-a-day 25: man-who-sold-the-world-o-phone

ranjit — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 07:03:05 +0000

I was listening to David Bowie’s "The Man Who Sold The World" and wanted to reproduce its distinctive percussion.

You may recognize the beads from last year.

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