Musical Instruments
If necessity is the mother of all invention, whimsy is its crazy (but beloved) uncle. Pictured above, I present a hollowed out and curved two-by-four of knotted pine, terminated with pine reeds (the 'tubaphor'). Accompanying this was software that determined which knots were worth knocking out and using as finger holes (to change the pitch of the sound). Pictured in the center, above, is a modern aeolian harp (the 'overtoner') that sits in the windowsill and plays itself in the wind. On the right is an active chladni plate (the 'fabophonor') that rearranges sand on its surface, according to music. Also, this device displays simple pictures as a function of time division multiplexed Bessel functions, driven by the actuators only at the rim of the plate.
I'm currently working on musical instruments made from glass, together with the MIT Glass Studio. Stay tuned!