Cool! Japanese Artist Turns Old TVs into Percussion Instruments

There are still old TVs kicking around?? You bet! And what is one to do with a bunch of old TVs you say? Why turn them into percussion instruments like Japanese artist Ei Wada did. He inadvertently discovered that old cathode ray tube television sets make great percussion instruments.
Today, his unique Braun Tube Jazz Band is famous the world over...


"Ei WADA" performance show in the Ibaraki-ken north area Part1

gee ibaken

Ei Wada’s Braun Tube Jazz Band @ transmediale

Ei Wada's Braun Tube Jazz Band @ transmediale, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.

"One day, a spectacular vision popped into Ei Wada’s mind. It was the image of abandoned electrical appliances being played as musical instruments in the streets of a city.
Some time later, he accidentally plugged a sound cable into a composite video connector port and the sound was rendered as an image. Seeing this he realised that re-recording the image with a camera and outputting it as an audio signal might reproduce the original sound. With this technique as a starting point, he set up pairings of tube televisions and PC-controlled video decks to correspond with the number of notes in a musical scale, creating a set of gamelan-like percussion instruments. Tapping the TV tubes produces primitive, cosmic electrical music. Paik meets the Theremin; Shannon meets McLuhan." (transmediale.de/content/braun-tube-jazz-band)

Laurent Hoffmann