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We’ve been running a special rebroadcast of the first season of Sound Builders, our show about noise (and the people rethinking how to make it), all week on Motherboard. We hope it tides you over until the forthcoming season of Sound Builders, which you can catch here this month.
First, we revisit artist and musician Ken Butler, who’s on a mission to create artworks that reference the ergonomic relationship that a “guitar” has to the human body. Sometimes, as he told us in 2010, on a tour of Anxious Objects workshop in Brooklyn, that means rewiring the image of an instrument as a cultural weapon.
A hatchet-turned-violin? Check. A hockey stick/tennis racket mashup that you can play as a guitar, bass, or violin, and also as a percussive instrument? Check. For Butler, the shape, size, and tonal possibilities of Frankensteined sound devices are seemingly limitless.
“These are all made of existing things,” Butler said. “If you can vibrate it, there’s nothing you couldn’t make into an instrument. Absolutely nothing.”
Stay tuned for the premiere of our next season of Sound Builders right here on Motherboard.
Watch More Sound Builders:
Watch Psych-Pop Duo Peaking Lights Make Sound Waves with Recycled Electronics:
Watch Sound Designer Diego Stocco Build a ‘Mad Mac’-Style Bass With Pipes:
Reed Ghazala, the Father of Circuit Bending:
This Robotic Guitar Looks Nothing Like a Robot or a Guitar (But It Still Shreds):
This Is What an Underwater Pipe Organ Sounds Like:
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 Weapons Into Guitars: Sound Builders){kind=link}