I can't stop thinking about the difference in the young man in this story. How his "education" is different at home from what a normal school day is like.
(from this NYT article "Listen to Five of the World's Newest, Wildest Instruments")
For years, Tolgahan Cogulu has been teaching the guitar to play new notes. “I love the guitar,” he said speaking in a video interview recently. “However, I cannot play my own music.”
Turkish music relies on microtones, while the traditional guitar has frets that arrange pitch according to Western tuning systems. In 2008, Cogulu designed a microtonal guitar with movable frets, but it has remained a specialist instrument.
One day his young son Atlas made a Lego replica of his father’s microtonal fretboard. Cogulu immediately realized its potential. “It is a miracle idea,” he said. “It’s the most popular toy in the world, and it’s the most popular instrument. And if you combine them it becomes a microtonal guitar — because you can move the frets on the Lego studs.”
Rusan Can Acet, an engineer and graduate student at Istanbul Technical University, came up with the idea to 3D-print a base plate for the fretboard. The Lego pieces are snapped into place, and a set of 3D-printed movable frets are attached on top. Production was almost laughably cheap, Cogulu said, and only briefly halted when they had used up all the thin single square pieces in Atlas’s Lego collection that are essential to their design.
In lessons with his students, Cogulu realized he had hit on a tool for teaching music theory. With its movable frets, the Lego microtonal guitar makes visible the changing intervals in various Western, Turkish and Balinese modes. Cogulu and his team are making the 3D-printable files available to anyone for a modest contribution. He also plans to build fully assembled versions that he hopes will be useful in music schools.
No comments:
Post a Comment