moonmilk

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.

Posted via email from moonmilk’s posterous

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

Posted via email from moonmilk’s posterous

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

Posted via email from moonmilk’s posterous

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!

Posted via email from moonmilk’s posterous

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

Posted via email from moonmilk’s posterous

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

Posted via email from moonmilk’s posterous

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.

Posted via email from moonmilk’s posterous

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.

Posted via email from moonmilk’s posterous

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!

Posted via email from moonmilk’s posterous

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!

Posted via email from moonmilk’s posterous

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:

Posted via email from moonmilk’s posterous

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.

Posted via email from moonmilk’s posterous

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.

Posted via email from moonmilk’s posterous