Car Music Project

The project began in 1994 as an attempt by Bill Milbrodt to "turn a car into music that can be expressed in written form and, therefore, performed and interpreted by more than one musician or group of musicians." More specifically, Milbrodt wanted playable musical instruments created from his own car, and wanted them to represent the four instrument families of the traditional orchestra: winds, brass, percussion, and strings. To accomplish his goal, he hired professional auto mechanics to disassemble his car, and commissioned metal sculptor Ray Faunce III to create a series of playable musical instruments from the car's parts. Faunce worked with a team that included musicians, an engineer, a physicist, a glass cutter, and others to create a series of instruments, some of which are "purebred" (only car parts) and some of which are "hybrids" (car parts plus traditional musical instrument parts). The resulting instruments have names like Convertibles and Tube Flutes (winds), Strutbone and Exhaustaphone (brass), Percarsion (percussion, of course), and Tank Bass and Air Guitar (strings). Milbrodt and his team have fully documented the general capabilities and tuning idiosyncrasies of all the instruments.

Here is Bill Milbrodt's Myspace page with several compositions available for listening there.

Here is a video of the band performing at Philadelphia Live Arts Festival in 2005.

Sea Organ in Zadar, Croatia

The Sea organ is an architectural object located in Zadar, Croatia and an experimental musical instrument which plays music by way of sea waves and tubes located underneath a set of large marble steps. It is actually a water organ. The waves create somewhat random but harmonic sounds. The device was made by the architect Nikola Basic as part of the project to redesign the old city coast (riva), and the site was opened to the public on April 15, 2005.

Here are a couple of videos with the sound of Adriatic sea playing.