Musical instruments I made
By Tony K.T. Leung
Last updated: March, 1999
I made one and a half musical instruments. One instrument is a standard violin, and the other is a novel musical input device called BATMIDI. BATMIDI counts as half an instrument since it is crude from a musical perspective.
I
finished the violin in 1992, after three part time semesters of Musical Instrument Making
at the Ontario College of Art. In this course taught by Luthier Phillip Davis, students
choose to make wood based instruments such as violin, guitar, harp, etc. I took the
course, not because I dreamt of becoming a luthier, but because I wanted the experience of
building a musical instrument from scratch. I was intrigued by the art of musical
instrument making, where art and science is in careful balance.
My other “instrument” creation is actually a computer-input device developed during my undergraduate thesis in 1987. I called it BATMIDI. Like a bat, BATMIDI uses ultrasonic waves (SONAR) to measure the distance between the device and a sound-reflecting surface. The distance is used as a parameter to control a Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) instrument. BATMIDI fits in the palm of your hand. You could have one in each hand, with each device controlling different musical parameters.
© Copyright 1999 Tony K.T. Leung. All rights reserved.