Here is a photo of Lindsay Pollack pumping out a tune on a carrot. Yep on a carrot and you will have to take my word for it but if you heard you would not be able to tell the difference from a more conventional instrument.

Lindsay combines the disparate but related disciplines of physics and music to challenge our conception of what is required to make music. Lindsay knows that it is the bore and length of the tube that generates the notes not composition of the wall of the musical instrument that forms the notes. To demonstrate he takes a piece of garden polly pipe, drills some holes along the side, attaches a clarinet mouth piece and the sound is virtually indistinguishable from a commercially purchased clarinet, and somewhat cheaper the manufacture.

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Still not convinced that the instrument wall has little to do with the sound? That is where the carrot comes in. He takes an ordinary raw carrot and, using a hand drill, drills a 10mm hole through the middle. Then, with a 4 mm drill, puts in the holes along the sides (he has the distances between the holes marked on a guide so he gets them in the correct positions). Attach a clarinet mouth piece and a kitchen funnel and you have a functioning musical instrument that has a beautiful rich sound. (The kitchen funnel is mostly for show, but it also adds a little length to the carrot for the lower notes.)

Of course your standard carrot needs a mouthpiece to generate the vibrations that it will alter to create the notes that we hear and Lyndays uses a clarinet mouthpiece in this demonstration. It is the reed in the mouthpiece that generates the vibration and to prove that even this is replaceable with something much simpler he pulls out a small instrument that uses a piece of plastic stretched over a t-joint from a drip watering system to achieve the same effect.

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Enough of the woodwind section and on to the brass, or should I say “plastic pipe”, section of the orchestra. Once again he has a range of instruments that defy our understanding of what is required to construct an instrument capable of professional sound.

This is a bass instrument (the length of the polly-pipe guarantees that). It is operated by turning on and off taps which control the flow of air through parts of the instrument.

And finally, to prove that nothing is sacred, here is a photo of him playing his home constructed bagpipes, or perhaps more correctly, plastic glove pipes.

As the name suggests the bag is a rubber glove. The drone is a piece of aluminium pipe and the chanter is a piece of polly pipe.

How much more fascinating this must be for students involved in his music classes than the ones The Green Man attended. If you are interested in this sort of thing you may like to check out Wind World