Benjamin Franklin invented the glass harmonica, inspired by the parlor trick of playing music on water-filled glasses. The ...

JEFFERSON AS MUSICIAN He was an incurable tinkerer with a keen interest in all the technical innovations for instruments, and corresponded with friends about all the new and “often peculiar things to ...

Digital electronics has profoundly changed musical instrument design. From toy keyboards to performance-grade pianos, synthesizers, and drum sets, to name a few, instruments that once would have been ...

It started after my mother died. She was a concentration-camp survivor—a prodigy concert pianist in Vienna who was taken when she was only a girl. She taught me the piano by holding her hands over ...

In the early 20th century, Chicago became an epicenter for the manufacture of musical instruments. Credit: Illustration by Frank Okay Like a giant urban phoenix, Chicago rose from the ashes of the ...

For the past 26 years, the Guthman Competition at Georgia Tech’s Department of Music has introduced the world to strange and innovative instruments. The contest welcomes inventors from all over the ...

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Humans have been making musical instruments from whatever items are close at hand for thousands of years, and we aren’t showing any signs of slowing down yet, least of all artist [Nicolas Bras] and ...