Music Thing: Musical instruments made of Lego

By Peter Rojas

Each week Tom Whitwell of Music Thing highlights the best of the new music gear that's coming out, as well as noteworthy vintage equipment:

People have been building playable musical instruments from Lego for some time. Henry Lim's
Lego Harpsichord and Brad's
Lego Guitar have been written about many times, but they're only the start:

  • Robotic Glockenspiel Player: XILO is a
    slightly frightening-looking device which uses the Lego camera to watch the player and transfer his or her
    movements into real-time Glockenspiel playing: "With just a little practice, you can make XILO create beautiful
    music!"

  • Lego Dulcimer (pictured above): What
    is it with medieval instruments and Lego? Mountain Dulcimer enthusiast Peter Always built himself a bright yellow
    dulcimer with properly-spaced frets made of little grey tiles.

  • Lego MIDI Guitar: The 'Lifelong Kindergarten' group at MIT
    developed this lego-based system. The idea was that children could use special Lego components to build their own
    experimental instruments, which would work as MIDI controllers.

  • Robotic Ukulele Players: Mike and Jarvis'
    reggae-playing Ukulele robots were
    widely reported earlier this year,
    but they weren't the real pioneers.
    Bryant and Amelia got there in
    2003, although theirs didn't play reggae.

  • Singing Lego Blocks: The
    Lego Mindstorms RCX block (the brain of the system) has a built in speaker, and
    this page explains in
    eye-watering detail how to make music with it. Remarkably, there doesn't seem to be a MIDI interface yet...

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