What’s the strangest musical instrument you’ve ever encountered?
Street performers can be exceptionally creative with turning ordinary objects into musical instruments. This can range from developing virtuosic technique on bucket drums to crafting original instruments like these pipe drums. Among many more ingenious inventions and performances by buskers are tennis racquet guitars and a sort of thumb harp made from cutlery, and glass bottle percussion instrument in Helsinki.
Along a similar train of thought, percussionist Fernando Saci demonstrates how really anything can be a musical instrument, including squeaky dog toys and plastic juice bottle tops. Likewise, the Vegetable Orchestra (from Vienna, Austria) constructs instruments from fresh produce and performs on them the same day of their construction. I can only imagine the degree of listening and technical adaptability that these musicians must have! After all, every vegetable is unique in its size and shape, and you don’t have much time to develop your technique on a carrot-flute that will start to decay in a couple days.
These sorts of instruments don’t necessarily require elaborate technical virtuosity or engineering capability, but they do require a good ear and an adaptable mindset. You need to be able to hear the sounds around you and capture them effectively to express the music you hear in your head.
Some musical instruments seem exotic and unusual from inside the western music cultural bubble, but in reality they have been around for thousands of years as part of other musical cultures. Some examples of this are the didgeridoo (of Australian aborigine origins dating back 1500 years) and the ocarina (with Chinese and mesoamerican origins dating back 12,000 years). The former is popular in meditative music and the latter is most widely known because of its role in the in the Legend of Zelda Nintendo game.
Other unusual musical instruments have developed with quite a bit more engineering and intention.
The theremin is an electronic musical instrument that you’ve almost certainly heard in soundtracks to eerie situations in movies. The theremin was invented in the early 1900s, functions using electromagnetic fields, and is played without physical contact with the instrument. Watching it being played is as eerie and surreal as listening to it. There are no keys, strings, or other visual references. Players use only their ears and physical gestures. In addition to eerie movie soundtracks, the theremin has been used in avant-garde classical music (the first being Shostakovich in 1931) and rock and popular music since the 1940s and 50s.
The Hang is a relatively recent musical instrument that looks like a metal UFO held in the lap and has a resonant metallic and percussive sound like steel drums. It was trendy in the early 2000s, though more recently its creators have turned their focus to a similar class of instrument called the Gubal.
Here’s a complicated instrument that I stumbled upon by chance, a ‘marble machine’ by the Swedish band Wintergaten. It’s a one-of-a-kind instrument propelled by 2000 marbles, and most likely not on the market for purchase. From the looks of it, only its maker could really know how to play it.
Other instruments require considerable engineering to design and construct, but once constructed, they don’t even need a player - they are played by nature itself. Examples of these are the Zadar Sea Organ in Croatia and the Singing, Ringing Tree in Lancashire, U.K.
Which of these unusual instruments are new to you? Are any especially surprising? Which sounds do you genuinely enjoy? Are there any sounds that rub you the wrong way, or that perhaps seem like a novelty that would wear off quickly?
I’m sure there are many uncommon that I’ve left out and have probably never even heard of! What’s missing? Are there any that you feel like people would really love listening to, if only they were more widely known?
If you play an unusual instrument, how did you discover it and what inspired you to play it? How did you go about learning it? Did you study from online tutorials, Lessonface teachers, visits to regions where the instrument is taught, or other other sources?
