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.    

We have been looking at two well known examples of homemade instruments from the skiffle music era. The washboard and the tea-chest bass. An old washboard is modified by attaching a strap and using thimbles on your figers to create a percussive sound. A tea-chest bass can be recreated by using an upturned plastic storage box, some string a washer and a broom handle.

The band enjoyed watching some videos of people playing these kinds of instruments. We talked about the basic principles of resonance and amplification as well as having some good fun playing the two instruments.