If you start the video below and then go browse in another tab, leaving the audio running, you’ll probably swear you’re listening to some weird but beautiful electronic music. But the sounds are actually produced by the Yaybahar, an acoustic stringed instrument invented by Turkish musician Görkem Şen.

The bonkers instrument is completely electricity-free and made of springs, strings, and frame drums. Vibrations from the strings travel down the coiled springs to the frame drums, where they are turned into sounds that bounce back and forth on the springs. Şen plays the Yaybahar by drumming on the frame drums, smacking the horizontal springs, and strumming or plucking the vertical strings.

The sounds it makes are otherworldly. They range from light and melodic to deep and ominous; thanks to the nature of the instrument the sounds resonate for sustained periods and create layers upon layers of sound. The performance in the video was filmed in real time with no special effects or post processing. Watch the video until the end and you’ll hear the musician sneak in a bit of “Ode to Joy” just to make music nerds squeal with delight.

The post This Acoustic Instrument Sounds Like it Comes From Space first appeared on Gajitz.

Ask any serious musician and they will tell you that their instrument of choice feels like a natural extension of their own body. For media artist Dmitry Morozov, that is true in a literal sense. He created an instrument that reads a tattoo on his arm as a musical score. Along with a device that mounts onto his arm, the tattoo makes Morozov into a kind of cybernetic musical instrument.

The Tattoo Sound Controller consists of a handle and two rails, along which move sensors. The sensors “read” the black shapes of Morozov’s tattoo and translate them into sounds that remind us of a garbage truck, or perhaps someone hitting piano strings with a wrench.

The tattoo is specifically designed to leave the maximum amount of time between “triggers” so that the instrument is as flexible as possible. The speed, direction, and step length of the sensors can all be adjusted so that, according to Morozov, there are an infinite number of variations on the sounds.

A Wii controller in the handpiece allows Morozov to move his hand in three dimensions and create new and interesting sounds simply by changing up the speed and angle at which the sensors read the tattoo. According to the artist, this creative hybrid of human and machine represents the melding of the artist and his instrument.

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Humans have been playing rock music far before Elvis and the Beatles. These oblong stones which date back to the New Stone Age (8000-2500 BCE) were once thought to be grain grinders. They resided in the storeroom of the Natural History Museum in Paris since the early 20th century. By chance, an archaeologist tapped one with a mallet in 1994 and heard a resonating musical note – and he suddenly realized that these stones were ancient musical instruments.

The archaeologist who made the discovery, Erik Gonthier, had to work for several years to convince the scientific community that the stones were more than agricultural tools. Gonthier dug some pieces of foam out of the trash and put them under the stone as rests. He tapped the stone with a mallet again and the same musical tone rang out. They were eventually classified as lithophones, a combination of the words for “stone” and “sound.” The image above shows a lithophone setup called the Skiddaw Stones which resides in the Keswick Museum in England.

The stones at the Natural History Museum mainly originated in the Sahara and were probably taken to France by soldiers stationed in that area in the early 20th century. Made from different types of sandstone, the lithographs probably sounded very similar thousands of years ago as they do today. The stones would have been placed on brackets made of leather or plant fibers to be played, xylophone-style. Although we see them as musical, the lithophones could also have been used to communicate over long distances or to send danger signals.

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Remember that science experiment where you wired a potato to power a light bulb? That was an example of how electricity can travel through everyday objects to perform unlikely tasks. Earlier this year, UK artist Ryan Jordan took it a step further when he ran a workshop in Montreal that used geological elements to make musical instruments.

He rather pretentiously titled the project “Derelict Electronics,” a somewhat insensitive jab at what a homeless person might construct for musical instrumentation (something also apparent in the design of the ‘instruments’). Luckily, the underlying technological ideal is pretty cool.  Jordan is showcasing the way electricity, and ultimately sound, travels through what most would regard as refuse.

“When an electric current is sent through the rocks,” Jordan explains, “sporadic noise bursts from the speakers. With some fine tuning these rocks begin to behave like microphones, amplifying howling feedback and detecting subtle scratches and disturbances in their surrounding environment.” Jordan based his premise on a 1933 experiment, the “Adams Crystal Amplifier,” which was an early version of the modern transistor.

The post What’s That Sound: Spontaneous Music From Odd Material first appeared on Gajitz.

500 years later, Leonardo Da Vinci’s repertoire continues to produce things that amaze. The latest is a musical instrument he dubbed the ‘viola organista,’ and a Polish concert pianist has reproduced one that’s both completely functional and absolutely beautiful.

Slawomir Zubrzycki reportedly put in an estimated 5,000 hours of work over three years, pouring $10,000 into the instrument, a true labor of love. What emerged from this creative endeavor was a beautiful contraption that’s a combination piano (or harpsichord) and bowed string instrument. This Da Vinci replica’s beauty is found in both its aesthetics and engineering.

It essentially takes the key work one would do on a piano, and instead of hammers hitting the strings to produce sound, four spinning wheels covered in horse hair do the work. It’s meant to mimic the technique one uses on a bowed string instrument. Zubrzycki pumps a pedal to make the wheels turn and when the keys are played, the strings press onto the wheels “emitting rich, sonorous tones reminiscent of a cello, an organ and even an accordion,” according to the Hindustan Times. The schematics were found among the flying machines and anatomical sketches of one of Da Vinci’s 15th century notebooks. Zubrzycki showed off his impressive sound machine at the 5th International Royal Krakow Piano Festival last month. It’s hard to decide which is more beautiful – the organista’s sound or design.

The post Da Vinci’s Dream: 15th Century Musical Device Comes to Life first appeared on Gajitz.