My sister got me three presents this year for Christmas, three musical instruments.
This is one of them.
This is called a thumb piano, which is just basically made out of a coconut shell, half
a coconut shell, obviously hollowed out with a piece of plywood on top.
And these pegs, which are suspended or have a held in place of a piece of metal by another
piece of metal, so that you get a resonance.
And this is what it sounds like.
This one's like a cricket or a grasshopper, and it makes a sound like a grasshopper.
A frog, you see him, and this frog's got a spiney back, and he makes a noise like a
frog.
There you go.
So what I was going to try and do, now we've got some percussion and a melodic instrument
that makes tones, we're going to try and use a bit of technology to make a piece of random
music out of these objects, so here we go.
So first of all, I had to chop the samples up, and the next job was to build a step sequencer
which I've done here in a program called Max MSP.
So each one of these boxes is a drum beat, so it's a 16 step sequencer, and there is
where I can store my thumb piano sounds.
So now, if I click here, we've got a tempo set at 160 beats per minute, and we're just
going to play one box, there it is, and what I've done is I've built a random counter to
make sure that every time it plays that box, it doesn't always play the same note.
I've also built a reverb unit here, which you can barely see, but trust me it's there,
so we can put some reverb on, so let's give it a few more notes, and there's our reverb
unit.
So it's just a straight square, and if I go to 16th, so I reckon this could be quite
good to make a piece of music, so let's see what we come up with.
Here we go.
I'm not sure if you can hear me, but I can hear you.
I can hear you.
I can hear you.
I can hear you.
