Musical Instruments / Build a Band
This project was a great learning experience. I also really enjoyed this project. In my opinion it was the most enjoyable project we've had all year. We had the most fun of the project making the PowerPoint presentation for our instruments. As you will see farther down below, it's a very entertaining presentation.
For this project, we had to create three different types of instruments (Chimes, Woodwind, and Strings), and each instrument was required to play at least 7 notes (one full octave). The three instruments we constructed were:
I learned a lot about myself in this project. I learned that trying to be nice to everybody doesn't work out if you're also trying to call the shots in the group. People won't take you seriously enough because you aren't being affirmative. So, in this project I learned that I need to be more assertive. There's room to be nice all the time after you make your point.
This project could have gone better if we had somehow made our Bamboo Pan Flute produce louder notes. For some reason, it required a lot of air to make a loud note, while other groups' flutes played loudly with not much effort at all. If we had done some more research on how to do that, our flute could've been much more audible. It also could have gone better if we had painted our Glockenspiel. It was a pretty makeshift-looking thing, and it wasn't very nice looking. It may have sounded good, but it didn't look good.
Below, you can check out our PowerPoint presentation. There's some pictures of the instruments for you to look at down below the presentation as well.
For this project, we had to create three different types of instruments (Chimes, Woodwind, and Strings), and each instrument was required to play at least 7 notes (one full octave). The three instruments we constructed were:
- Glockenspiel (Chimes Instrument)
- Bamboo Pan Flute (Woodwind Instrument)
- 3-String Guitar (Strings Instrument)
I learned a lot about myself in this project. I learned that trying to be nice to everybody doesn't work out if you're also trying to call the shots in the group. People won't take you seriously enough because you aren't being affirmative. So, in this project I learned that I need to be more assertive. There's room to be nice all the time after you make your point.
This project could have gone better if we had somehow made our Bamboo Pan Flute produce louder notes. For some reason, it required a lot of air to make a loud note, while other groups' flutes played loudly with not much effort at all. If we had done some more research on how to do that, our flute could've been much more audible. It also could have gone better if we had painted our Glockenspiel. It was a pretty makeshift-looking thing, and it wasn't very nice looking. It may have sounded good, but it didn't look good.
Below, you can check out our PowerPoint presentation. There's some pictures of the instruments for you to look at down below the presentation as well.
Glockenspiel (Chimes Instrument)
The Process of Building:
First, we constructed a frame that the pipes were going to rest on. Next, we hammered nails into the two longer pieces of wood, and then we tightly wrapped rubber bands around the nails so the the pipes would have something to rest on that wouldn't cause it to lose too much vibration when we hit it. Once all that was done, we cut the pipes to the appropriate lengths (there is a table of pipe lengths on the 4th page of our presentation). We placed the pipes onto the rubber bands and it was good to go. Below, you can see a picture of our finished Glockenspiel, and also watch a slow-motion video that shows how the pipes of the Glockenspiel vibrate.
Bamboo Pan Flute (Woodwind Instrument)
The Process of Building:
First, we needed some bamboo to build our Pan Flute with (because we wanted to be fancy and not use PVC pipe). So, we went ahead and "borrowed" some from a generous neighbor who had too much of it. It's like we were helping him. After we got the bamboo, we cut it up into equal lengths. After that, we cut those lengths to the appropriate lengths to produce notes (there is a table on page 7 of our presentation). After that, we tied all the tubes together with string and stuck them together with glue for extra stability, and it was finished.
3-String Guitar (Strings Instrument)
The Process of Building:
First, we began by taking two pieces of wood and constructing the neck of the Guitar from them. Next, we made the box of the Guitar. We cut holes in the front and back sides so that the neck could rest inside. After everything was put together, we put the front plate of the Guitar on and made sure everything stayed together fine. After, we took some bone and placed it on the top of the neck and close to the bottom of the box. The strings were going to rest on the bone, because bone is very hard and doesn't let and vibrations escape elsewhere into the Guitar. While the bone's glue was drying, we drilled holes in the top of the neck for the fastens to go in. Once the glue was dry and the fastens were in, we tightly wove the Guitar strings from the fastens to the end of the Guitar. We cut a hole in the front plate of the box so that sound vibrations could escape. After that, we tuned the fastens so they produced a note. Finally, we tested the lengths we would have to hold the strings to produce different notes and marked them (there is a table of chord lengths on page 10 of our presentation).
Terms
- Sound Vibrations - A type of wave that propagates as a typically audible wave of pressure and displacement, through a medium such as air, water, or solid.
- Glockenspiel - a musical percussion instrument having a set
of tuned metal pieces mounted in a frame and struck with small hammers.
- Chime - a bell or a metal bar or tube, typically one of a set tuned to produce a melodious series of ringing sounds when struck.
- Pan Flute - an old musical instrument that has five or more pipes of gradually increasing length.
- Woodwind - wind instruments other than brass instruments forming a section of an orchestra, including flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons.
- Guitar - a stringed musical instrument with a fretted fingerboard, typically incurved sides, and six or twelve strings, played by plucking or strumming with the fingers.
- Strings - musical instruments that produce sound from vibrating strings. In most string instruments, the vibrations are transmitted to the body of the instrument, which also vibrates, along with the air inside it.