Blow it out your....

September 17, 2007 6:06 PM

The "paint with sound" concept has been done before though perhaps never so beautifully (IMO). I found it best with just piano and upright bass, but YMMV. Via Unusual Instruments' Music Videos blog, which doesn't have craploads of content, but I did find the array mbira video quite interesting. This whole concept reminds me of other unusual instruments I've seen on the internet, like this guy and his broccoli ocarina and these folks and their pipe hat and this guy playing what appears to be an electric tennis racket violin. Previous (a, b)
posted by Kickstart70 (6 comments total)

Forget the tennis racket violin thing, that piece of rubber that he's playing is the bomb! How the fuck? I mean, I get the theory behind it, but, it just doesn't even look like he's playing it.
posted by symbioid at 6:27 PM on September 17, 2007

I've linked to this before, and it's at my own blog, but painting with sound works the other way around too. Cool post, though it's missing my friend Mike's bulletproof guitar helmet.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 6:47 PM on September 17, 2007

I saw Ken Butler (the tennis racket guy) at the Knitting Factory a few years back, where he also played a bicycle, a toothbrush, and a shovel.

Laurie Spiegel's Music Mouse had a similar interface to the paint-with-sound thingy, way back in 1987! It was more musically sophisticated but not nearly as pretty as this one. You can download a copy from her site if you still have a primitive enough computer to run it!

And speaking of painting with sound, Jan de Weille's makes music with MS Paint. You can download the Soundmaps program he uses to turn any GUI software into an instrument, and listen to the surprisingly catchy music he's made, at Best of Windows [starts playing music automatically]
posted by moonmilk at 7:33 AM on September 18, 2007

Thou shalt not resize my goddamn browser window. Thanks. Other than that, very neat thingy.
posted by OverlappingElvis at 10:09 AM on September 18, 2007

OverlappingElvis, in FireFox there's the option to disallow that and other JavaScript annoyances (Tools/Options/first Advanced button).

The Array Mbira is a pretty awesome instrument. Out of my price range but I can't at all blame 'em.
posted by Foosnark at 2:55 PM on September 18, 2007

I liked that quite a bit. The "strings" were my favorite, and it was really tranquil to play around with.
posted by 6550 at 12:09 AM on September 19, 2007