The move towards making musical instruments out of plastic

boing
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Man, I read all of these comments, and no love for the Bundy clarinets that were a staple of school bands for so long? I mean, the humble clarinet has been made of plastic and resin for so long, it’s where a lot of instrument makers got experience in how plastic resonates differently from wood. Well, that and in making speakers.

Really, the main problem I see with a lot of plastics is that they are much more susceptible to becoming brittle over time, through exposure to UV and other things that break the long-chain molecules. I don’t see plastic instruments being passed on from generation to generation, but come on, how many instruments actually survive to that stage?

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I can’t believe boingboing got through this article without mentioning 3D printing even once!

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It’ll bounce. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0CdjSTCWAw

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There has always been two competing ideas about music. It seems like the wealthy has always thought that making music should be expensive and is a waste of resources for the lower classes; and only the finest instruments are worth having.

And the lower classes thumbed their noses at the rich and played music by any means necessary: building instruments out of found materials, buying crappy instruments that the wealthy turn their noses up at, designing folk instruments that can be made by members of the community that don’t even pretend to be other types of instruments, and so on. And often incorporating the byproducts of these decisions into their musical styles.

I mean, you’re probably thinking I’m meaning the music of the streets like rap, hip-hop, found percussion, and stuff like that. And you’re darn right I am. Those are fine, valid musical expressions. But I’m also meaning rock and roll, metal, bluegrass, country, jazz, folk, folk metal, Tibetan throat metal, Mongolian Rap, and basically everything except classical orchestra music. (Although, I mean; there isn’t much more metal than composing an orchestra which has a artillery component.)

Plastic instruments is the next wave in getting instruments into the hands of people who couldn’t have instruments before. It’s a thing to be celebrated. A lot of people need that spark to figure out how they can make music on their own and an inexpensive instrument can be that spark. In some ways we are in an environment right now that discourages people from making music recreationally; our culture is starting to push people to either being a professional musician or not making music at all, but making music is a fundamental human need; so anything like this that helps people get going is great!

Besides, every ounce of carbon in a plastic instrument that gets played and loved until it is no longer playable then thrown away and buried in a landfill is an ounce of carbon that doesn’t get put into the air… (And I imagine that a lot of the parts and components of the plastic instruments will be plundered for folk instruments before it gets thrown away.)

(Full disclosure: I own a plastic guitar that is horrible and doesn’t get played, a plastic djembe drum which is wonderful and gets played as much or more than my traditional djembes, and a ton of other instruments, most of which are made out of wood.)

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Oh sure, people always go on about the rights of the “White Man” or the “Black Man” but nobody ever cares about the plight of the Plastic Man.

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Yup, that’s what happened to my brass!

Sent on my Samsung Galaxy S7.

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It’s way worse than that, even. It’s a dark secret that almost all recycling has been dead since 2017. Aside from aluminum and some other scrap metals, the only reason it was economical to recycle anything was that China was buying it all crazy cheap. They stopped doing that, so pretty much all recycling is going in the landfill now. Municipalities are keeping up the infrastructure with the multiple bins and the blue trucks and everything just to keep everyone in the habit of doing it in case a new market can be found.

In a nutshell, recycling only works as long as there is a huge and poor country willing to buy our garbage. Right now there isn’t, and it’s all getting landfilled.

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I often hear instruments rated on their playability, and that’s a valid concern (there’s some of it here with regards to the plastic horns), but when you know that so many poor folk musicians built their own guitars and banjos out of bailing wire and cigar boxes it illustrates that the drive to play music can overcome any obstacle, including a poorly made instrument.

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Honestly, I think biodegradability is overrated. Nothing degrades in landfills anyway. Hundred-year-old newspapers are still readable when dug up. They’re basically air-tight lockboxes that are ironically quite good at preserving things.

Biodegradability is great for the oceans, of course, and forgive me if that’s all you were going for there. It would certainly be a win if we could reduce micro plastics contaminating the entire food chain. That said, plastic makers are really cagey about those terms. “Biodegradable” in plastics sometimes just means “UV from the sun will cause it to fall apart” which doesn’t really solve anything.

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Yeah, that’s true.

Fuck.

Even worse and true! I mean, future archeologists/historians will love it, as they love midden heaps… BUT… there are bigger considerations at hand.

It seems to me that we need more than just a singular answer here, but an entire overhaul of our production and waste systems. We need to make goods that are either reusable, actually recyclable, or actually biodegradable. On top of that, we need to figure out more effective strategies for waste management, from top to bottom - how we collect, how we dispose of items, and how we recycle.

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One word: Vuvuzela. Though I’d dispute anyone calling it a musical instrument.

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That could prevent injuries. My high school was small, so many of us played different instruments in the orchestra. I’d started on the violin, and picked up flute and sax for marching band. My friend played flute in the orchestra and bells in marching band - until she developed a hernia. After that, she switched to marching with a piccolo.

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Well put! I read somewhere recently that the “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” motto was ordered by importance, but everyone missed that detail. We all fixated on “recycle” because it was a Get Out Of Gluttony Free card for liberal-guilt sufferers in wealthy countries.

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That is an instrument (of torture).

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I played tuba in high school, and marched with sousaphones, the fits-around-your-body tubas.

Brass sousaphones sound better than fiberglass sousaphones, but fiberglass still gives a decent sound and is lighter than brass.

My second or third year, the band acquired a four-valve concert tuba. Oh my, that beauty was a pleasure to play … valves that slid like greased pigs, flawless easy tones like deep golden butter.

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OTOH, concert flutes are considered woodwinds even though they are usually all-metal and don’t even have a reed like saxophones do.

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It’s not just that, though. I think that as individuals, there is only so much we can do. There absolutely needs to be a systemic solution to all this, and it has to be global. Us making individual choices as consumers will help a little, and will be an influence on others, but it’s not going to fix the problem.

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And it was an adaptation of Robert Heinlein’s, “Starship Troopers”.

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I don’t play an instrument, but this kind of seems like it might make a difference in the sound.

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towards the end of the video, at about 21m56s, he mentions the hazard of overgreased valves.

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