9 Unusual Instruments Worth Trumpeting About

nineties or so. But I think she actually thought we were going to look at Fish, like one really pretty striped bass or something like that, But she did. I think it's because food is always on her mind just being the host that I didn't think about that. You're probably right because she rode trips to see Fish as well.

But you know, just thinking back on the list of bands that we've seen, I know we saw Lady Smith, Black Mambazzo, George the Roots, maybe so many different shows over the years, but there is one I'm a little disappointed that we haven't seen, and that's the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra. So when I hear a name like that, I feel like it's got to be like the string cheese incident or some sort of like you know, lesser known jam Ben.

This is not the case at all. I mean they've been around for about twenty years now and it's pretty incredible what they do. So the musicians actually go to a farmer's market on the day that they're performing. Then they pick out some vegetables in order to make their instruments out of Like they'll make trumpets out of zucchini. Then they'll slice up an eggplant in a way that collapsed together all of these other fascinating instruments, and they

do this all the day at the concert. Well, yeah, of course, I mean your veggies have to be fresh when you're making instruments, you know, if you think about it. And and then they take the parts of the veggies that they don't use for instruments and they cook it all into a soup. So this just takes some like two or three hours to make the instruments, and they're cooking this whole time, and then they have this really long sound check because, as you might imagine, it takes

a while to tune an instrument made of vegetables. But then they put on these shows and it's amazing mango like, they cover everything from class school music too, of course kraft work. You know, if you got vegetables about as, we'll play some craft work. Yeah, German electronic music. That's pretty cool. Yeah. And the best part is they feed the audience the soup at the end of every concert, so you get the music and the meal. And it

just sounds like so much. But you know, hearing about these recorders made from carrots and these symbols made of green peppers, and it made me think, what are other unusual instruments that we should be keeping an ear out for? And that's what today's nine Things is all about. So let's dive in. Hey, their podcast listeners, I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good friend man guest Ticketer, and sitting behind the soundproof glass trying to

turn his rotary telephone into a brass instrument. I believe he calls it a trump phone. That's our that's our friends and producer Tristan McNeil. What a weirdo. But I have to say I'm also a little envious that he came up with a tromphone. But uh, you know, it's funny that we chose today to talk about weird instruments because I just saw this video online of a guy playing pocabell cannon on a rubber chicken. Did you see this? No?

And how does he do that? So? I guess he holds it in various places as he squeezes, and he figured out how to get different tones out of this rubber chicken. And then he shot himself in like four different videos like doing each of the musical parts and he sink them all up. It is ridiculous, especially like when you consider that this is the song that people like march down the Aisle two for weddings and graduations

and whatever. It's pretty infrontible. I kind of want to pause right now and go check this out and then come finished recording. But but I'll have to check that out, all right. Well, where do you want to start with all of these? Well? How about with the most basic and most annoying of instruments out there? The voos a lot.

So if you're a sports fan, I'm sure you remember the long plastic buzzing instruments from the South African World Cup where the Zeila showed up and they irritated players and refs and basically anyone who was watching TV, so

of course FIFA banned them from stadiums. But as I was looking into it, it turns out the Zeila actually has this murky origin story, like a number of people claimed to have invented it, but the person who gets the most credit is this guy named Freddie Saddam Make who claims he developed the first one in the nineteen sixties by taking off his bicycle horn and then adding a mouthpiece to it and blowing through it. And uh, I guess he used it as a signal to like

call people over or to get people to meet. It's kind of like an annoying dinner gong or something. But over time it got extended, replicated, and now they are all these weird iterations of it, like um Hunda decided to build the world's largest one. It was a hundred fourteen feet long, which terrifies. Someone actually took a toy Bozela, bedazzled it with real diamonds and gold dusted it and then hold it to like a Russian oligarch for thirty dollars,

which just feels ridiculous and amazing. But you know that the weirdest thing I've read about is that the plastic instruments are actually tuned to be flat, which is funny because to me, you know, they just sound like cacophony. But vouzelas are in B flat. And according to space dot com, so is a black hole that's out there.

These astronauts at NASA at the Chandra x Raight Lab, they figured out that this giant black hole emits a B flat note that's fifty eight octaves below middle C. So if you lay your boozela and sampled this black hole, it would actually harmonize pretty nicely. We'll have to we'll have to try that out sometimes. That's pretty great. All right. Well, here's an instrument i'd love to visit. And when I say visit, that's because you'd have to go to Croatia

and actually on the coastal Croatia. And it's called the Sea Organ and it was designed by this architect named Nicola Bassage, and it's a way to gently welcome people coming to port. And it's actually really beautiful. Now. On surface, it looks like these giant marble steps with greats, but beneath each one is a series of small channels that connect thirty five organ pipes, and the way it's designed,

each step plays a slightly different musical cord. Now, because this thing is powered by waves and by wind too, it seems like it could get really annoying, but it actually makes these pretty gentle and kind of random sounds. That almost sounds like someone is touching the sides of a steel drum or playing the wind chimes. And it actually pairs really nicely with the calming view that's there. Oh,

that sounds really lovely. So, speaking of unusual instruments that live on the coast, Eve's actually pointed me to the steam whistle, which I guess is technically a whistle or instrument, and I've never heard the origin story, and it's pretty fascinating. So, as you guess, lighthouses didn't work that well in super foggy conditions, like the light didn't always carry the fog bells, which is I guess what they used to use. Also didn't work as effective warnings over long distances. So there's

the Scottish engineer are. His name is Robert Folis, And he was walking home on this foggy night, and as he got closer and closer to his house, he heard his kid playing the piano, and the higher notes were all muffled by the fog, so he couldn't hear any of those, but the low notes all carried in the fog.

And so he goes home he thinks about this, and he realized, what if you created a whistle that was powered by this superheated steam, and if it made this very low noise, it would actually carry And the guardian called it a fog alarm. That's how we thought about it. And so he hooked the thing up to a clockwork valve so it could be set to admit these noises

automatically every few minutes. And of course this's also this manual setting, and that was useful for sending out morse code when we wanted to do it through sound signals instead of light signals. Yeah, that's interesting. I never thought about lighthouse whistles being used to send out messages, but I mean, I guess it makes a lot of sense. Yeah, it's pretty cool. So where do you want to go

from there? Well, I feel like we've been talking about instruments that are too mellow or beautiful or even safe, So I think this is why it's time to bring up the pyrophone. So I thought this was a lead in to talk about the capiano, which I know we've talked about before. For those of you aren't familiar with it, it's a piano where you press the keys, and they'd brought a little kitten behind them who would mew in

different keys. I guess I forget why was it invented? Again, though, I think it was invented to cheer up like an Austrian prince or something, but it took us off topic. What's a pyrophone? Nice to be an Austrian prince and have that kind of instrument invented for you, all right, Well, a pyrophone. You know, when I first read about it, it sounded like an organ for pyromaniac that has nicknames

like fire organ and explosion organs. So it sounds like a dangerous thing, and especially when you realize it needs propane or gasoline to run and to make it work. There's a certain part of it actually does need to be on fire, but it's actually way safer than that. And essentially it uses these glass tubes and when a fire is lit in the tubes, they vibrate to make a sound. I mean, that sounds so much better than like a aliment of tiny explosions, which is kind of

what I was imagining. So I'm going to talk about the suxophone, which isn't as weird as something like a taxidermy badger that's been turned into a theremin, which is a real thing that you can buy on YouTube. Yeah, there's some really cool electronic instruments. Like I saw someone on YouTube and created this cabinet where you open all the drawers and they play different notes, so that you could actually play a cabinet. How much fun would that

p That's really awesome. I've also seen people, um they wire up books so that if you turn to a certain page, it has a certain frequency, so that when you flip through the pages it plays different notes. It's pretty crazy. But the suxophone, which I always loved because you know exactly where it came from. It's name for the American band leader John Philip SUSA. He actually commissioned

the instrument. But if you've ever seen a marching band play, you know the suxophone because it's basically this distinctive tuba like instrument. It wraps around a player's body and it kind of blares the notes over everyone's heads and projects it pretty far. And the way I said that makes it sound like it's almost clunky or snake like, but it's kind of like a more elegant tuba for when you're on the move. I guess the reason I'm bringing up is that the suxophone players are basically the cards

or jokers of marching bands. And I didn't realize this, but almost anytime there's a skit or some sort of shenanigan, it always seems to involve them. So here's a quick list of things I found collected at one place on Wikipedia. So when the Ohio Marching Band performs this traditional script Ohio formation, it's the suxophone that dots the eye. It's already like suxophones have this special place. So here's another thing. At USC, the suxophone players play John Williams Imperial March

from Star Wars. They do this anytime they cross the street. They go single file on their way to and from performances on the USC campus. The University of Delaware Fighting Blue Hens do skits. I didn't realize this, but they'll break off from the band and run around the line and do all these skits around the field and Virginia Tech has their suxophones do the hokey pokey at games where they take their suxophones out, put them in, shake

them all about. Basically, it sounds like, if you're a kid who's really into joking around but also into the marching bands, you should really take up the sun. That makes a lot of sense actually, because it just sounds fun. All right. So this is a quick one and kind of a gross one. So have you ever seen a Macedonian gadget? Let me, I was prepared for you to say, now, so I'm gonna pull up this up this picture for you.

Here it is. Is he holding a goat? Yeah? So a gadget is strange because you actually keep the animal kind of intact, like the skin becomes the wind bag, and sometimes, like in this version, they keep the animal's head or hoofs attached. And these are found all over the region and Greece and Bulgaria, Turkey, Romania. But the sound is a lot like a bagpipe, Like it's just one that a fan of taxidermy might have around their home, you know, which seems like a particular person who both

likes taxidermy and the sounded bag. You know, yeah, there there is a there's a cross section of those people out there. So we still got two more facts to go. But let's take a little break first. All right, to mego, I know today's shows all about weird instruments, and you're actually just telling me about this cool show you saw at the Guggenheim. I guess it was this this past summer, right, Yeah, so I've actually forgotten about this until we started talking today.

But there was this exhibit of all these Chinese artists called One Hand Clapping at the Gugenheim, and the art was fascinating, like, uh, there was a VR thing where you actually are the basketball and Jeremy Lynn is dribbling you around and then shoots you as a three pointers. It's insane and you're just sort of like flying through the air and you feel yourself going through the net.

It's amazing. But there are all these incredible installations and things, and the thing that really kind of stuck with me was from this artist named Sampson Young. He had this giant mouthpiece that was just put on the wall and he had molded it for an enormous brass instrument, and

if you built the rest of that trumpet. I guess it would have been like twenty ft long and about eight or nine feet high, and every five minutes or so, there was a concert where he'd created these programs on the computer to model the sounds, so it would be this like deep booming revelie for that trumpet that would just like kind of shake the room where um he had invented this bugle and wondered what it would sound like if you blew through it at a temperature of

three degrees celsius. And it was really cool, but it was like a It was this mix of super fantastical and whimsical instruments that you could never build in real life, but with real sounds generated from computers. It was a really funny experience. I love the idea that you would just be curious, like I wonder what a bugle sounds like when you blow through it at a temperature of three hundred degrees Like this just such a I think he went to m I t hears something. He's he's

definitely got this scientific mind as well. That's pretty cool. I'm curious though, like was the music any good? I mean I wouldn't say good so much as interesting, but but it was definitely worth visiting anyway. But where do you want to finish this off? Well, speaking of interesting and theoretically possible but also hard to pull off, I feel like we should talk about the Helicopter string Quartet. Now. This was written by Karl Heinz Stockhausing and it's got

this weird story behind it. So apparently stock Housing got this commission for a string quartet and he wasn't that interested in it, but then he had this crazy dream where he was at a party and someone snubbed him and he was so mad that he flew away, and beneath him were these four helicopters that each carried a member of a string quartet and they were all playing together. So then he has this follow up dream, of course,

where he wanted to add bees to it. And I don't know if the bees ever make it in the real performance, but he liked that extra bu thing they added to the helicopter rotors. I think, of course, you know, this is how you dream when you're a brilliant composer. But the piece he finally wrote is this elaborate and very expensive to perform thing. But basically it starts out in a music hall with four pillars, and for some

reason you need the pillars. And then the members walk into four helicopters and take off and circle a radius of six kilometers around the hall. And this is all televised down to the audience. Not Also, every helicopter needs a sound technician in it so that the sounds of the choppers are blended with the sounds of the quartet. And I know this all sounds very confusing, and it

is very very confusing, but it's also fantastic. And the gist of it is, if you're writing a composition and you don't have helicopters in it, you're probably just not thinking big enough, you know, Mango, Yeah, that's probably true. I feel like it is a good way to get people into classical music though, right, Like, if you're into helicopters, you should be into music this But you know, because you did a composition, I think I'm gonna end mind

with a weird composition as well. And this one's by John Cage who composed four thirty three, which is that composition of total silence and it's performed at a piano with no sound. You know, that was a response to music. The story is actually fascinating. People should look it up. But I wanted to talk about a different song he wrote, and this one's called as Slow as Possible, And while it's meant to be played slowly, there's really no specification

on just how slow it should go. So the slowest current performance of this starting in two thousand one at this old church in Germany, and it's supposed to end in so it's actually gonna take six hundred thirty nine years to perform, and if you visit the church, you'll actually have to wait a few months before accord even changes. So you know, it's momentous when it does, and people

are excited when that happens. But apparently the reason they chose that length of six nine years is partially because that's about the lifespan they could hope for for a newly refurbished organ, and the instrument might breakdown after that point. But you know, if that was the case, they might actually have tried to drag it out for longer. That's pretty great. Well, you know, I like the fact that you've given us something to look forward to over the

next six d and thirty nine years. You know, we can check in on it every year. See how it's going. So, um, you know what I think. I'm going to give you today's fact Off Trophy. Congratulations. That sounds great. Thank you so much, and thanks as always to Eaves Jeff Code for her brilliant research. Thank you guys for listening. We'll be back with a full length episode tomorrow