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Odd Music

Wednesday, 29 August 2007

Today I read a small article in our daily newspaper ( De Volkskrant ) about the site Oddmusic.com. As a fan of unusual instruments and the music produced on them I checked out the website right away and had a great time reading and listening what they have to offer. Here is a small piece of audio from The First Vienna Vegetable Orchestra :

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“The Vegetable Orchestra performs music solely on instruments made of vegetables. Using carrot flutes, pumpkin basses, leek violins, leek-zucchini-vibrators, cucumberophones and celery bongos, the orchestra creates its own extraordinary and vegetabile sound universe. The ensemble overcomes preserved and marinated sound conceptions or tirelessly re-stewed listening habits, putting its focus on expanding the variety of vegetable instruments, developing novel musical ideas and exploring fresh vegetable sound gardens.”
Another odd instrument that I liked very much is the Great Stalacpipe Organ. For mysterious reasons I could not copy and paste the information, so yoy have to check that out yourself. But it sounds like this:

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I just pick some random highlights from the Odd Music site, but there is much much more fascinating material to be found there. Like the Nano Guitar:
”The world’s smallest guitar is 10 micrometers long — about the size of a single cell — with six strings each about 50 nanometers, or 100 atoms, wide. Made by Cornell University researchers from crystalline silicon, it demonstrates a new technology for a new generation of electromechanical devices.”
”The LEGO harpsichord, created and built by Henry Lim, with the exception of the wire strings, is entirely constructed out of LEGO parts—the keyboard, jacks, jack rack, jack rail, plectra, soundboard, bridge, hitch pins, tuning pins, wrestplank, nut, case, legs, lid, lid stick, and music stand are all built out of interlocking LEGO plastic bricks and related pieces.”

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If you want to hear some really odd music, play all three tunes at the same time.

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