With 3 marimbas completed it was time to enjoy exploring some of the smaller taonga. The ding boxes I made for my niece's sound garden in Hokitika were a lot of fun, and I decided to make two pentatonic sets for Te Ara Whānui, particularly for the littlies. A ding box is a wooden box with a tuned chime inside. When you stand on the lid this hits a striker, which in tune causes the chime to ring.
Ding box internal mechanism
A visit to the local metal recyclers resulted in a set of narrow aluminium pipes, and I tuned these to the notes C, D, E, G, A & C, and drilled holes at the nodes to mount them. After making a prototype box to get all the dimensions right and make it as low to the ground as possible, I used an assembly line process to put the rest together:
Prototype and assembly line
When all the boxes are stood on at once, this creates a lot of different notes ringing for a long time - up to 22 seconds. To have more control over the length of each sound, I experimented with fitting a silencer to the boxes, so the chime would only ring when the lid was pressed down, and stop once the person's foot was off it. This means you can choose between short notes for playing melodies, or long ones when you want them.
Construction
Here are the finished instruments, one of the two complete sets. They have been painted with white undercoat by my Y5 students, who will continue the process next year, applying their own artwork to produce colourful instruments for the collection.
Te tangi a ngā pouaka - ding boxes in action!
No comments:
Post a Comment