Instrument-making: First day

Today was the first day for instrument-making. It didn't fail my expectations at all. I knew it was going to be fun, and I was right. We got shown some examples of experimental instruments first.

There were four favourites of mine that he brought in. One was two bowls stuck together with rods on the side and a bit of water poured in to it. That one made an eerie, beautiful sound when played with a bow.

The one with just one bowl and many rods made pure, clear sounds which I really liked.

The most fun one was the two stones. It sounded lively and youthful.

The last favourite was the one-hole bamboo flute with a membrane on either side. Sounded like birds and I like how it's so simple.


Later I did a little bit of experimenting and found that rubber bands stretched over cans makes very clear, beautiful sounds, and if you stretch the band while the sound is still going its pitch slides. I liked that, so I decided that I'll do a string instrument.

This is one of the many diagrams of the initial design.

I made an initial design for it. It's expected that the design will change as I make some small tests to see if that design would work. In summary, the middle four strings are violin strings and the remaining eigth strings on the sides are a mixture of rubberbands and nylon thread as sympathetic strings. Sympathetic strings are strings that aren't played directly. They make their sounds according to the vibrations made by strings that are played. This is like many Indian instruments, such as the sitar. To get the sympathetic strings to vibrate I'd need to transfer enough of that vibration from the violin string to those strings. Which is why there's a wooden rod inside to do that, while the cans amplify the sound. The rod holds the cans together and lets the vibrations travel through it.

This design does have quite a few problems though. For a start it would be a pain to thread in the violin strings and to put new ones in if they break. It would be difficult to take it apart once it's put together if something goes wrong. It's an inconvenient design. So some tests would have to be done to see if it actually works first before making it for real.
A picture of my experimental space. That's the test can in the middle, some test balloons to experiment with membranes, violin strings, nylon strings, and there's a rubber band threaded through the test can.

Later I did some tests. And good thing I did because the original design wouldn't make the kinds of sounds I'm after. The strings wouldn't make a great sound unless it's stretched across the diameter of the cans and the addition of a bridge (used a pencil for that in the test) diminishes the vibration. Therefore, in theory, the wooden rod on the inside wouldn't work either to give a sufficient amount of vibrations.

This is an opportunity to improve the design and discard parts of it that are not needed. I'll want to simplify it, maybe minus the middle can and take away the rod as well as the bridge.