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Four Totally Original and Brilliant Musical Instruments

There’s a huge number of awesome home-made instruments out there. They do all sorts of weird and wonderful things, so let’s take a look at four brand new instruments that some pretty brilliant, creative people have designed themselves.

1. The Yaybahar is probably the coolest thing you’re going to see all week 

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We’re quite accustomed to synths being designed to sound like acoustic instruments, but the other way around?
The Yaybahar, designed by Turkish musician Görkem Şen. Şen handcrafted the instrument, redesigning and remodelling over a number of years using strings, drums and coiled springs to allow for a huge variety of beautiful sounds and rich textures. “The vibrations from the strings are transmitted via the coiled springs to the frame drums,” he explains.  “These vibrations are turned into sound by the membranes which echo back and forth on the coiled springs. This results in an unique listening experience with an hypnotic surround sound.”

You NEED to listen to this right now. He uses NO additional effects or production tweaks. It’s fucking amazing. Learn more here.

2. The Illumaphone: Coffee cups? or beautiful musical instrument?
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Invented by software engineer Bonnie Eisenman, she explains that the Illumaphone is “A light-based, spatial, electronic musical instrument” which is made from six coffee cups. Using photoresisters, an Arduino Uni board and a few other impressive-sounding utilities, each cup is assigned a musical note, and they interact with hand waves and movements to manipulate the volume and vibrato, kind of like a theremin?
It’s amazing! You can read more about it here and watch/listen to the beautiful sounds below:

3. The Ototo turns ANYTHING into a musical instrument!

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A London design team used Kickstarter to fund Ototo, an experimental device that employs “Capacitive sensing,” turning ANY object into an instrument via measuring and converting electrical charge into sound. Sound can be generated either from a synthesiser or sampler, and four sensors control the sound – pitch, loudness, and two which control texture. You can connect anything to the device with crocodile clips to turn ANYTHING into an object. Learn more about it here and here!

4. The AlphaSphere is revolutionising the way you create electronic music – and it looks so cool

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Adam Place & his company Nu Desine have invented an electronic music “ball” that acts like a MIDI controller, allowing you to attach any sound to any pad on the ball. There’s endless possibilities of sound and sample manipulations, including loops, pitch changes and more, which operate simply by  pressing each pad (with a pre-determined sound/sample/beat) harder or softer. Place explains: “It breaks the limit of conventional performance interfaces like keyboards and drum pads, bringing new tactile control to electronic musicians.”

Watch this, you will be amazed: