May 29, 2026 • 20 mins
Who invented the vuvuzela, and why? Should every party include a sousaphone? And is it possible to make music with vegetables? Today Will and Mango discuss 9 instruments they don't want their kids practicing inside the house!
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This episode originally aired on August 23, 2018.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Guess what, mango?
Speaker 2 (00:03):
What's that?
Speaker 3 (00:04):
Well, so, over the years, we've been to so many
good concerts together, also so many bad ones together. But
we were just telling a friend the other day how
we'd actually road trip to see Fish in college.
Speaker 4 (00:15):
Right, Yeah, we were at a bar. We were talking
to any from Food Stuff.
Speaker 3 (00:18):
Well, and the thing is is, you know, she's a
little bit younger than us, so I'm not sure she's
as familiar with some of the bands that were big
in the nineties or so. But I think she actually
thought we were going to look at Fish, like one
really pretty striped past or something like that.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
But she did.
Speaker 4 (00:33):
I think it's because food is always on her mind.
Just being the host night, I didn't.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Think about that.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
You're probably right because she road 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 Mambaso, George Clemton, The Roots, Moby, 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.
Speaker 4 (00:57):
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 jambin.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
No, right, this is not the case at all.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
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 claps together all of these other fascinating instruments.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
And they do this all the day of the concert.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Well, yeah, of course, I mean, your veggies have to
be fresh when you're making instruments, you know, if you
think about it.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Sure, And then they take.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
The parts of the veggies that they don't use for
instruments and they cook it all into a soup. So
this just takes them 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 manga like. They cover everything from class
(02:00):
cool music to of course craft work. You know, if
you got vegetables, you might as well play some craft work.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
German electronic music. That's pretty cool.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
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 fun. But you know, hearing about these
recorders made from carrots and these symbols made of green peppers,
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,
(02:51):
their podcast listeners, I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm
joined by my good friend Mangash hot ticketter 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.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
What a weirdo.
Speaker 4 (03:08):
But I have to say I'm also a little envious
that he came up with the 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 PoCA bell cannon on a rubber chicken.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Did you see this?
Speaker 4 (03:22):
No?
Speaker 1 (03:22):
And how does he do that?
Speaker 4 (03:23):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
It is ridiculous, especially like when you.
Speaker 4 (03:39):
Consider that this is the song that people like march
down the Aisle two for weddings and graduations and whatever.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
It's pretty incredible.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
I kind of want to pause right now and go
check this out and then come finish recording. But but
I'll have to check that out, all right. Well, where
do you want to start with all of these?
Speaker 4 (03:55):
Well? How about with the most basic and most annoying
of instruments out there, the vuvuza.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
Oh yeah, So, if you're.
Speaker 4 (04:02):
A sports fan, I'm sure you remember the long, plastic
buzzing instruments from the South African World Cup where the
vuvuzela showed up and they irritated players and refs and
basically anyone who was watching TV.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
So of course FIFA banned them from stadiums.
Speaker 4 (04:14):
But as I was looking into it, it turns out
the vuvuzela actually has this murky origin story, like a
number of people claim to have invented it, but the
person who gets the most credit is this guy named
Freddy 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.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
Blowing through it.
Speaker 4 (04:33):
And 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 there
are all these weird iterations of it, like Hyundai decided
to build the world's largest one. It was one hundred
and fourteen feet long, which terrifies me. Someone actually took
(04:55):
a toy vouvzela bit dazzled it with real diamonds and
gold dusted it and then told it to like a
Russian oligarch for thirty thousand dollars Wow, which just feels
ridiculous and amazing. But you know, 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 vuvuzelas are in B flat.
(05:18):
And according to space dot Com, so is a black
hole that's out there. These astronauts at NASA at the
Chandra X ray lab, they figured out that this giant
black hole emits a B flat note that's fifty eight
octaves below middle C.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
So if you flat your.
Speaker 4 (05:33):
Vouvzela and sampled this black hole, it would actually harmonize
pretty nicely.
Speaker 3 (05:38):
Oh well, we'll have to try that out sometimes.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
That's pretty great.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
All right.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
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 coast of Croatia. And it's
called the Sea Organ and it was designed by this
architect named Nikola Bassage and it's a way to gently
welcome people coming to port and it's actually really beautiful surface.
It looks like these giant marble steps with grtes, but
(06:03):
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 chord. Now, because
this thing is powered by waves and by WIN two,
it seems like it could get really annoying, but it
actually makes these pretty gentle and kind of random sounds
that almost sound like someone is touching the sides of
(06:26):
a steel drum or playing the wind chimes. And it
actually pairs really nicely with the calming view that's there.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
That sounds really lovely.
Speaker 4 (06:37):
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on multiple devices, nordvpns for you. So, speaking of unusual
instruments that live on the coast, Eves 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 guessed, lighthouses didn't
(09:35):
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 was a Scottish engineer,
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,
(09:57):
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
(10:18):
be set to emit these noises automatically every few minutes.
And of course there'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.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
Yeah, that's interesting.
Speaker 3 (10:30):
I never thought about lighthouse whistles being used to send
out messages, but I mean, I guess it makes a
lot of sense.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
Yeah, it's pretty cool. So where do you want to
go from there?
Speaker 3 (10:37):
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.
Speaker 4 (10:47):
So I thought this was a lead in to talk
about the cat piano, 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 prodd a
little kidden behind them who would mew in different keys.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
I guess I forget why was it invented?
Speaker 4 (11:00):
Again, though I think it was invented to cheer up
like an Austrian prince or something.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
But I took us off topic. What's a pyrophone?
Speaker 3 (11:10):
Nice to be an Austrian prince and have that kind
of a instrument invented for you, all right, Well, a pyrophone.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
You know, when I first read about it, it sounded like.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
An organ for pyromaniacs 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.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Make it work.
Speaker 3 (11:31):
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.
Speaker 4 (11:45):
I mean, that sounds so much better than like a
scale made of tiny explosions, which is kind of.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
What I was imagining.
Speaker 4 (11:51):
So I'm going to talk about the suzophone, 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.
Speaker 3 (12:00):
Yeah, there's some really cool electronic instruments. Like I saw
someone on YouTube that created this cabinet where you open
all the drawers and they play different notes, so that
you could actually play a cabinet.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
How much fun would that be.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
That's really awesome.
Speaker 4 (12:12):
I've also seen people 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 suzophone,
which I always loved because you know exactly where it
came from. It's named for the American band leader John
Phillips SUSA. He actually commissioned the instrument. But if you've
ever seen a marching band play, you know the suzophone
(12:34):
because it's basically this distinctive tuba like instrument. It wraps
around a player's body and it kind of blars 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 it up is that
(12:55):
the susophone 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 susophone that dots the eye. It's already like
(13:17):
susophones have this special place. So here's another thing. At
USC the suzophone players play John Williams Imperial March from
Star Wars.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
They do this anytime they cross the street.
Speaker 4 (13:27):
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 susophones do the hokey poke at games
where they take their susophones out, put them in, shake
them all about. Basically, it sounds like, if you're a
(13:51):
kid who's really into joking around but also into the
marching bands, you should really take up the susophone.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
That makes a lot of sense, actually, because it just
sounds fun. All right.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
So this is a quick one and kind of a
gross one. So have you ever seen a Macedonian gadgett me?
I was prepared for you to say no, So I'm
I'm gonna pull up this up this picture for you.
Speaker 4 (14:11):
Here it is is he holding a goat?
Speaker 3 (14:15):
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, in Greece and Bulgaria, Turkey, Romania.
But the sound is a lot like a bagpipe, Like
(14:37):
it's just one that a fan of taxidermy might have
around their home, you.
Speaker 4 (14:40):
Know, which seems like a particular person who both likes
taxidermy and the sound of bagpipe. You know.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
Yeah, there's a cross section of those people out there.
Speaker 4 (14:50):
So we still got two more facts to go. But
let's take a little break first.
Speaker 3 (15:08):
All right, so 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.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
I guess it was this past summer, right.
Speaker 4 (15:18):
Yeah, so I'd 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 googen Him
and the art was fascinating, Like 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 pointer. It's insane and you're just sort of like
(15:40):
flying through the air and.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
You feel yourself going through the net. It's amazing.
Speaker 4 (15:43):
But there were 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'd
molded it for an enormous brass instrument. And if you
build the rest of that trumpet, I guess it had
been like twenty feet long at about eight or nine
(16:04):
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'd be this like deep
booming revelle for that trumpet that would just like kind
of shake the room where he had invented this bugle
and wondered what it would sound like if you blew
through it at a temperature of three hundred degrees celsius.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
And it was really cool.
Speaker 4 (16:27):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
It was really fun to experience.
Speaker 3 (16:37):
I love the idea that you'd just be curious, like,
I wonder what a bugle sounds like when you blow
through it at a temperature of three hundred degrees.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
Like, this is such a weird.
Speaker 4 (16:46):
I think he went to Mit or something. He's definitely
got this scientific mind as well.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
That's pretty cool. I'm curious that, Like, was the music
any good?
Speaker 4 (16:53):
I mean I wouldn't say good so much as interesting,
but it was definitely worth visiting.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
Anyway, where do you want to finish this off?
Speaker 3 (17:02):
Well, speaking of interesting and theoretically possible but also hard
to pull off, I feel like we should talk about
the Helicopter string Quartet.
Speaker 4 (17:10):
Now.
Speaker 3 (17:10):
This was written by Carl Heinz Stockhausen, and it's got
this weird story behind it. So apparently Stockhausen 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
(17:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
Bees to it.
Speaker 3 (17:41):
And I don't know if the bees ever make it
in the real performance, but he liked that extra buzzing
they added to the helicopter rots.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
I think, sure, of course, you know, this.
Speaker 3 (17:50):
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's arts 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
(18:11):
six kilometers around the hall. And this is all televised
down to the audience. And 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
(18:33):
don't have helicopters in it, you're probably just not thinking
big enough, you know, Mango.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
Yeah, that's probably true.
Speaker 4 (18:40):
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, 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.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
You know, that was a.
Speaker 4 (19:01):
Response to music. The story is actually fascinating. People should
look it up. But I want 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 and one at this old church in Germany, and
it's supposed to end in twenty six forty. So it's
(19:24):
actually going to take six hundred thirty nine years to perform.
And if you visit the church, you'll actually have to
wait a few months before a.
Speaker 2 (19:30):
Chord even changes.
Speaker 4 (19:32):
Wow, 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 hundred and thirty nine
years is partially because that's about the lifespan they could
hope for for a newly refurbished organ and the instrument
might break down after that point, but you know, if
that was the case, they might actually have tried to
(19:52):
drag it out for longer.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
That's pretty great.
Speaker 3 (19:53):
Well, you know, I like the fact that you've given
us something to look forward to over the next six
hundred and thirty nine years.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
You know, can check in on it every year, see
how it's going.
Speaker 3 (20:03):
So you know what, I think, I'm going to give
you today's fact Off trophy.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Congratulations.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
That sounds great.
Speaker 3 (20:09):
Thank you so much, and thanks as always to Eve's
Jeff cot for her brilliant research, and thank you guys
for listening. We'll be back with a full length episode tomorrow.
Guess what, mango?
Speaker 2 (00:03):
What's that?
Speaker 3 (00:04):
Well, so, over the years, we've been to so many
good concerts together, also so many bad ones together. But
we were just telling a friend the other day how
we'd actually road trip to see Fish in college.
Speaker 4 (00:15):
Right, Yeah, we were at a bar. We were talking
to any from Food Stuff.
Speaker 3 (00:18):
Well, and the thing is is, you know, she's a
little bit younger than us, so I'm not sure she's
as familiar with some of the bands that were big
in the nineties or so. But I think she actually
thought we were going to look at Fish, like one
really pretty striped past or something like that.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
But she did.
Speaker 4 (00:33):
I think it's because food is always on her mind.
Just being the host night, I didn't.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Think about that.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
You're probably right because she road 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 Mambaso, George Clemton, The Roots, Moby, 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.
Speaker 4 (00:57):
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 jambin.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
No, right, this is not the case at all.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
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 claps together all of these other fascinating instruments.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
And they do this all the day of the concert.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Well, yeah, of course, I mean, your veggies have to
be fresh when you're making instruments, you know, if you
think about it.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Sure, And then they take.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
The parts of the veggies that they don't use for
instruments and they cook it all into a soup. So
this just takes them 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 manga like. They cover everything from class
(02:00):
cool music to of course craft work. You know, if
you got vegetables, you might as well play some craft work.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
German electronic music. That's pretty cool.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
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 fun. But you know, hearing about these
recorders made from carrots and these symbols made of green peppers,
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,
(02:51):
their podcast listeners, I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm
joined by my good friend Mangash hot ticketter 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.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
What a weirdo.
Speaker 4 (03:08):
But I have to say I'm also a little envious
that he came up with the 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 PoCA bell cannon on a rubber chicken.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Did you see this?
Speaker 4 (03:22):
No?
Speaker 1 (03:22):
And how does he do that?
Speaker 4 (03:23):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
It is ridiculous, especially like when you.
Speaker 4 (03:39):
Consider that this is the song that people like march
down the Aisle two for weddings and graduations and whatever.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
It's pretty incredible.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
I kind of want to pause right now and go
check this out and then come finish recording. But but
I'll have to check that out, all right. Well, where
do you want to start with all of these?
Speaker 4 (03:55):
Well? How about with the most basic and most annoying
of instruments out there, the vuvuza.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
Oh yeah, So, if you're.
Speaker 4 (04:02):
A sports fan, I'm sure you remember the long, plastic
buzzing instruments from the South African World Cup where the
vuvuzela showed up and they irritated players and refs and
basically anyone who was watching TV.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
So of course FIFA banned them from stadiums.
Speaker 4 (04:14):
But as I was looking into it, it turns out
the vuvuzela actually has this murky origin story, like a
number of people claim to have invented it, but the
person who gets the most credit is this guy named
Freddy 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.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
Blowing through it.
Speaker 4 (04:33):
And 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 there
are all these weird iterations of it, like Hyundai decided
to build the world's largest one. It was one hundred
and fourteen feet long, which terrifies me. Someone actually took
(04:55):
a toy vouvzela bit dazzled it with real diamonds and
gold dusted it and then told it to like a
Russian oligarch for thirty thousand dollars Wow, which just feels
ridiculous and amazing. But you know, 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 vuvuzelas are in B flat.
(05:18):
And according to space dot Com, so is a black
hole that's out there. These astronauts at NASA at the
Chandra X ray lab, they figured out that this giant
black hole emits a B flat note that's fifty eight
octaves below middle C.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
So if you flat your.
Speaker 4 (05:33):
Vouvzela and sampled this black hole, it would actually harmonize
pretty nicely.
Speaker 3 (05:38):
Oh well, we'll have to try that out sometimes.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
That's pretty great.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
All right.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
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 coast of Croatia. And it's
called the Sea Organ and it was designed by this
architect named Nikola Bassage and it's a way to gently
welcome people coming to port and it's actually really beautiful surface.
It looks like these giant marble steps with grtes, but
(06:03):
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 chord. Now, because
this thing is powered by waves and by WIN two,
it seems like it could get really annoying, but it
actually makes these pretty gentle and kind of random sounds
that almost sound like someone is touching the sides of
(06:26):
a steel drum or playing the wind chimes. And it
actually pairs really nicely with the calming view that's there.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
That sounds really lovely.
Speaker 4 (06:37):
Wait, so can I tell you how excited I am
to have Nord VPN sponsoring our little show part time genius.
You know when I get excited, I make lists, and
I'm going to tell you why Nord is so great
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this is basically like an invisibility cloak that keeps you
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read two. It is great for sports fans. If you
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(07:41):
I also love watching soccer and tennis, but when I
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on up to ten devices, which is incredible. I mean,
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(08:24):
also I have like a million devices, so the idea
of spreading this across ten devices.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Is pretty amazing.
Speaker 4 (08:30):
It is premium cybersecurity for the price of a cup
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slash ptg. Our link will also give you four extra
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(09:15):
on multiple devices, nordvpns for you. So, speaking of unusual
instruments that live on the coast, Eves 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 guessed, lighthouses didn't
(09:35):
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 was a Scottish engineer,
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,
(09:57):
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
(10:18):
be set to emit these noises automatically every few minutes.
And of course there'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.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
Yeah, that's interesting.
Speaker 3 (10:30):
I never thought about lighthouse whistles being used to send
out messages, but I mean, I guess it makes a
lot of sense.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
Yeah, it's pretty cool. So where do you want to
go from there?
Speaker 3 (10:37):
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.
Speaker 4 (10:47):
So I thought this was a lead in to talk
about the cat piano, 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 prodd a
little kidden behind them who would mew in different keys.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
I guess I forget why was it invented?
Speaker 4 (11:00):
Again, though I think it was invented to cheer up
like an Austrian prince or something.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
But I took us off topic. What's a pyrophone?
Speaker 3 (11:10):
Nice to be an Austrian prince and have that kind
of a instrument invented for you, all right, Well, a pyrophone.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
You know, when I first read about it, it sounded like.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
An organ for pyromaniacs 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.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Make it work.
Speaker 3 (11:31):
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.
Speaker 4 (11:45):
I mean, that sounds so much better than like a
scale made of tiny explosions, which is kind of.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
What I was imagining.
Speaker 4 (11:51):
So I'm going to talk about the suzophone, 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.
Speaker 3 (12:00):
Yeah, there's some really cool electronic instruments. Like I saw
someone on YouTube that created this cabinet where you open
all the drawers and they play different notes, so that
you could actually play a cabinet.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
How much fun would that be.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
That's really awesome.
Speaker 4 (12:12):
I've also seen people 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 suzophone,
which I always loved because you know exactly where it
came from. It's named for the American band leader John
Phillips SUSA. He actually commissioned the instrument. But if you've
ever seen a marching band play, you know the suzophone
(12:34):
because it's basically this distinctive tuba like instrument. It wraps
around a player's body and it kind of blars 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 it up is that
(12:55):
the susophone 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 susophone that dots the eye. It's already like
(13:17):
susophones have this special place. So here's another thing. At
USC the suzophone players play John Williams Imperial March from
Star Wars.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
They do this anytime they cross the street.
Speaker 4 (13:27):
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 susophones do the hokey poke at games
where they take their susophones out, put them in, shake
them all about. Basically, it sounds like, if you're a
(13:51):
kid who's really into joking around but also into the
marching bands, you should really take up the susophone.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
That makes a lot of sense, actually, because it just
sounds fun. All right.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
So this is a quick one and kind of a
gross one. So have you ever seen a Macedonian gadgett me?
I was prepared for you to say no, So I'm
I'm gonna pull up this up this picture for you.
Speaker 4 (14:11):
Here it is is he holding a goat?
Speaker 3 (14:15):
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, in Greece and Bulgaria, Turkey, Romania.
But the sound is a lot like a bagpipe, Like
(14:37):
it's just one that a fan of taxidermy might have
around their home, you.
Speaker 4 (14:40):
Know, which seems like a particular person who both likes
taxidermy and the sound of bagpipe. You know.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
Yeah, there's a cross section of those people out there.
Speaker 4 (14:50):
So we still got two more facts to go. But
let's take a little break first.
Speaker 3 (15:08):
All right, so 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.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
I guess it was this past summer, right.
Speaker 4 (15:18):
Yeah, so I'd 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 googen Him
and the art was fascinating, Like 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 pointer. It's insane and you're just sort of like
(15:40):
flying through the air and.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
You feel yourself going through the net. It's amazing.
Speaker 4 (15:43):
But there were 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'd
molded it for an enormous brass instrument. And if you
build the rest of that trumpet, I guess it had
been like twenty feet long at about eight or nine
(16:04):
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'd be this like deep
booming revelle for that trumpet that would just like kind
of shake the room where he had invented this bugle
and wondered what it would sound like if you blew
through it at a temperature of three hundred degrees celsius.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
And it was really cool.
Speaker 4 (16:27):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
It was really fun to experience.
Speaker 3 (16:37):
I love the idea that you'd just be curious, like,
I wonder what a bugle sounds like when you blow
through it at a temperature of three hundred degrees.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
Like, this is such a weird.
Speaker 4 (16:46):
I think he went to Mit or something. He's definitely
got this scientific mind as well.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
That's pretty cool. I'm curious that, Like, was the music
any good?
Speaker 4 (16:53):
I mean I wouldn't say good so much as interesting,
but it was definitely worth visiting.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
Anyway, where do you want to finish this off?
Speaker 3 (17:02):
Well, speaking of interesting and theoretically possible but also hard
to pull off, I feel like we should talk about
the Helicopter string Quartet.
Speaker 4 (17:10):
Now.
Speaker 3 (17:10):
This was written by Carl Heinz Stockhausen, and it's got
this weird story behind it. So apparently Stockhausen 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
(17:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
Bees to it.
Speaker 3 (17:41):
And I don't know if the bees ever make it
in the real performance, but he liked that extra buzzing
they added to the helicopter rots.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
I think, sure, of course, you know, this.
Speaker 3 (17:50):
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's arts 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
(18:11):
six kilometers around the hall. And this is all televised
down to the audience. And 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
(18:33):
don't have helicopters in it, you're probably just not thinking
big enough, you know, Mango.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
Yeah, that's probably true.
Speaker 4 (18:40):
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, 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.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
You know, that was a.
Speaker 4 (19:01):
Response to music. The story is actually fascinating. People should
look it up. But I want 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 and one at this old church in Germany, and
it's supposed to end in twenty six forty. So it's
(19:24):
actually going to take six hundred thirty nine years to perform.
And if you visit the church, you'll actually have to
wait a few months before a.
Speaker 2 (19:30):
Chord even changes.
Speaker 4 (19:32):
Wow, 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 hundred and thirty nine
years is partially because that's about the lifespan they could
hope for for a newly refurbished organ and the instrument
might break down after that point, but you know, if
that was the case, they might actually have tried to
(19:52):
drag it out for longer.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
That's pretty great.
Speaker 3 (19:53):
Well, you know, I like the fact that you've given
us something to look forward to over the next six
hundred and thirty nine years.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
You know, can check in on it every year, see
how it's going.
Speaker 3 (20:03):
So you know what, I think, I'm going to give
you today's fact Off trophy.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Congratulations.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
That sounds great.
Speaker 3 (20:09):
Thank you so much, and thanks as always to Eve's
Jeff cot for her brilliant research, and thank you guys
for listening. We'll be back with a full length episode tomorrow.
Part-Time Genius News
Hosts And Creators
Will Pearson
Mangesh Hattikudur
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