Engineering Musical Instruments

Hey!

Unfortunately, the weather has not been the best lately, so I have not been able to go flying. I’m going to talk more about music at some point in time, but first I wanted to talk about how I’ve really seen music become more connected with my other interests. I signed up for this short, 1 month long, intro to mechanical engineering class, going in with very little expectations. Turns out that it is a project-based class and that the goal of the class was to build an instrument out of household materials. How cool is that?

This project stemmed out of when classes were online the past few years and engineering had to be implemented from a variety of different places. What a better way to get more creative and resourceful than using household materials to build a project?

It took me forever to come up with what type of instrument I even wanted to build out of everything imaginable and possible. Within that I did some research that I’m sure people are interested in. I came across the question of, what even is music at its very core? And one response to it was this piano piece called 4’33” by John Cage and in the same vein the Monotone Silent Symphony. I would encourage you to look it up if you don’t already know about it. If you don’t have the time, it’s basically a whole piece where the performer doesn’t play a single note on the instrument, but sits there in silence, and the music that is made comes from the audience’s reaction. It’s the whole idea of how silence is just as important as everything else in music and how music is a performance. Around the same time, I saw a poem my classmate from high school wrote who goes to a music college that relates very well. He talked about how in music “space has power too” and how “maybe you have to write 99 notes to realize the power of 3.” I don’t know, I think that’s just speaking to me right now, how intentional we can be with the littlest things in music. What do y’all reading this think? And do you have a really strong opinion of what music is or can be at its core?

Anyways, I decided on making a kalimba, aka a sanza, aka a thumb piano.  The kalimba originates from the mbira instrument out of Eastern and Southern Africa. The kalimba consists of a wooden board, usually with a resonator, with attached (metal) tines that are constructed to create different pitches when struck/plucked by fingers. 

 At first I had no idea what type of materials I could come up with from living my very simple college dorm life. But, with some time, ideas came up. At college, they often give out these metal water bottles, basically like 1 use plastic bottles, but metal. I can add in a picture for reference. So, I wanted to do something with them because I had access to them. I decided to take my kid scissors that I brought with me to college and see what I could do. In the end, I just cut flat strips and realized that I could make noise with them. Thus, a thumb piano.

 The kalimba I made is composed of different length tins strategically placed on top of a bridge that is held together by a sound box. The materials I used for this are a small 22 x 6 x 1.5cm box, a hair tie, and strips of metal cut from a water bottle found in the recycling bin. The hair tie acts like a bridge: part of the metal goes under it once and over it the second time. Changing the length of the tin from the second hair tie to its end changes the frequency that the tin resonates. 

Now, this is where my project turned into more engineering, because right where I left off was nowhere near being done. My instrument had to be tunable and it had to be part of a band of other homemade instruments.

The tuning process was rather difficult. To make a long story short, most of the different ways I tried to tune the instrument did not work because the devices I was using could not pick up the frequency of the kalimba when the sound was not constant, but rather plucked. My solution to this was to set up a drone on my phone or a different device and use my ear to match the kalimba to that pitch. 

I have attached below, pictures of my instrument and the song that my group decided to play together. I hope you enjoy!

-Jovie

I made the Kalimba on the bottom left. Can you guess the song that we played?