Creating Your Own Musical Instrument: A Design Guide

Designing Your Instrument

Create your own musical instrument, and write about it. This instrument could be a real,physical creation that you make and test, or it could be a “thought experiment” that you imagine you could build if you had enough time/skill/money/resources. Either way, it should be an original, realistic,playable instrument that humans could actually listen to and enjoy.
In your paper, you should describe your instrument and its properties in terms of what you have learned in this course. Some things you could include:
 Describe the design of your instrument.
Include a sketch of the different parts of the instrument, and of the entire instrument. Sketches don’t have to be a masterpiece, but just something to give an idea of how it could look.
A name for your instrument.
An analysis of your instrument using the “Five Part Model” (Introduced in Week 9, released Mar. 6)
The physics behind how harmonics are created when a single note is played.
A description of how your instrument might sound and what kind of music might best be played on it.
There are several staged deadlines (see next page), but the final version of your paper is due April 3. The style of your paper should be impersonal, objective and professional – the same kind ofscientific writing style you might read in a popular science magazine, like “Science”