Sound Sculpture: Creating a homemade wind instrument
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.
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.
Whilst making the Sonic Tree instrument we also created a wind instrument that had a basic plastic reed salvaged from a sound making toy, a sawn in half trombone and a collection of smaller ballpoint pens coupled with stretched balloons that would act like reeds. The idea was to make something that could be used expressively to create dramatic sounds in our piece. The saxophonist in the Carousel House band is a big fan of jazz musicians like John Coltrane so we were trying to create something that he could use to make wild free jazz style sounds that would not rely on elaborate fingerings etc. The final instrument worked well, especially when amplified with a microphone with a digital delay effect applied. Our Saxophonist named the instrument The Scat Machine!