Sound Sculpture: Building homemade instruments

Sound Sculpture: A new project exploring homemade instruments with a group of musicians with learning disabilities. The Carousel House Band is an integrated group from Brighton consisting of learning disabled musicians and music facilitators. 

https://www.carousel.org.uk/carousel-house-band/

We explore creative music making through a variety of project work designed to give the group interesting and rewarding challenges and provide collaboration opportunities with the wider community. In this project we are looking at homemade instruments; exploring how they work and in what ways we can have fun playing them. 

As our project developed we decided to create two homemade instruments. One would feature a pillar like structure that would have a variety of mostly percussive parts that several of the band members could play simultaneously (pic 1). The other was a wind instrument that utilises a synthetic reed from a toy instrument and vibrating rubber membranes made from balloons (pic 2). In the pictures you can see the band members exploring the percussive sounds of the pillar and the expressive sound of the wind instrument. Attached to the pillar are bells, cooking pan lids, sheet metal, metal poles and springs. All these items create unique sounds. The pillar is hollow and provides a little bit of amplification through vibrations from the percussive parts although we decided at this stage we would need to incorporate extra amplification to give this instrument a louder sound. We attached contact microphones which amplify vibrations that move through solid surfaces. With careful placement this enabeld us to amplifty the sounds on the instrument through the PA system in our rehearsal studio.