Everything Is an Instrument

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
In the days before PETA, people could get away with this.
"Is mayonnaise an instrument?"
—Patrick Star, SpongeBob SquarePants

Music has a long tradition behind it, and with any tradition comes traditions of form and style. For music, there are certain things that are considered musical instruments and certain things which aren't. For example, you wouldn't be surprised to hear a violin playing music, but if you were to hear a chainsaw playing a well-known melody, you would be.

Many people have found the idea appealing, and make an effort to make musical sounds out of things that wouldn't necessarily be considered musical. Body noises like belches and flatulence are rather popular, as are animal noises and violence used to produce melodies. Whatever is used, it's something removed from the norm. Sometimes it's done for comedic effect, but just as often it's used by serious artists who have found that weird instruments make good music.

See also Serendipitous Symphony and Trash Can Band. If they actually build an instrument out of it, it's a Xenophone.

Examples of Everything Is an Instrument include:


General

  • The Blue Danube Waltz is very popular for this kind of treatment.
    • An Animaniacs short had Wakko performing the Blue Danube using belches.
    • Happens in The Simpsons, with Homer munching the Blue Danube whilst in space.
    • Monty Python's Flying Circus has used "The Exploding Blue Danube."
    • An episode of House of Mouse has Mickey and Baby Shelby playing "The Blue Danube". Mickey plays on Shelby's shell like a xylophone, and Shelby does "ha ha"s to do the notes.
    • Someone once submitted a clip to You've Been Framed featuring two men doing the Blue Danube, with armpit burps.
    • Ferris Bueller demonstrates using his synthesizer keyboard to make fake coughing sounds by playing "The Blue Danube".
    • An episode of Phineas and Ferb features the aptly named "Marty the Rabbit Boy and his Musical Blender" playing Blue Danube on well, a blender.
    • The Muppet Show did a neat little skit set in a library, with Miss Piggy, Fozzie, Gonzo, and company playing it by coughing, rustling papers, tapping pencils, etc., and a librarian trying to shush them.
  • The World 1-1 theme from the original Mario has been played on everything capable of making a sound. Don't believe me? Go to YouTube.

Advertising

  • In a recent car battery ad, Gary Numan played his song "Cars" on a keyboard that was hooked up to the horns of about 30 black and white cars, arranged like the black and white keys on a keyboard. Point of the ad: The car battery was powerful enough to power thirty car horns and the keyboard, and then enough to start all 30 car engines.
  • This Cola ad resembles the picture at the top of the page, albeit with some kind of troll creatures in place of cats.
  • This New Zealand-produced advert selling insecticide for farmers.

Film

  • In Adventures of Baron Munchhausen the sultan had an organ where the notes played were screams of tortured people on the other side getting poked with spikes.
  • On a similar vein, Mel Brooks' History of the World: Part I had the Hallelujah chorus being sung by cavemen who had their feet and stomachs hit by rocks.
    • Later on, in the Inquisition scene, he uses the knees of Jews as a xylophone, and a victim's head as a bongo.
  • In the 1999 Disney film Tarzan, the song "Trashin' the Camp" is this trope, with instruments ranging from a typewriter and glass bell-jar percussion to an (elephant-enhanced) gramophone trumpet.
  • The 2010 movie Sound of Noise features a supposed terrorist group using Everything Is an Instrument as their weapon of choice.
  • In Return of the Jedi, the Ewok celebration scene at the end shows one Ewok using sticks hitting stormtrooper helmets as a drum set.
  • In a flashback scene in The Russia House Sean Connery and some Russian friends play a tune using improvised instruments such as matchboxes.

Music

  • Musical saws. Ordinary handsaws can be used as instruments, by rubbing a violin bow across the unsharpened side. They're popular enough that there are manufacturers making saws designed specifically to be used as musical instruments, rather than for cutting wood.
  • Various albums have cats or other animals singing Christmas carols.
  • Leroy Anderson's The Typewriter uses a typewriter as the percussion section with the keys clicking a rhythm and the carriage bell ringing at the end of each phrase.
    • Anderson was very fond of this. Other examples from his work include sandpaper in "Sandpaper Ballet" (fine, medium, and coarse to produce different pitches), alarm clocks in "The Syncopated Clock", and coconut shells and sleigh bells in "Sleigh Ride."
  • Imogen Heap, with everything from banging on carpets and light fixtures to recordings of dripping sinks, incoming trains, people talking, herself running around her flat... Should these not meet her requirements she can always turn to her wide collection of rather exotic instruments. Her current project is making songs out of whatever audio-clips her fans can provide her with, highlights including a spinning hamster wheel.
  • The Plasmatics were known for using and listing chainsaws and machineguns as instruments
  • The Deep Purple song "Fireball" features the air conditioner in the studio being turned on in the beginning.
  • The intro to Pink Floyd's "Money" has cash registers, coins and a paper ripping forming a melody. Remarkable, because it predated any viable sampling technology.
    • Pink Floyd actually had several similar songs. "Time," from the same album, begins with several alarm clocks sounding at once; "Seamus" features a "solo" of barking and howling performed by a dog; and "Dogs," "Pigs (Three Different Ones)," and "Sheep" all feature sounds from the animals referenced in the title. The first part of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" also features music made from wet fingers rubbing against the rims of wineglasses. In fact, Pink Floyd even had plans to release an album called Household Objects, an album that would feature music made from common every day items, but the idea was eventually scrapped.
      • The two songs recorded in the Household Objects sessions will be released on the 2011 reissues.
  • Penguin Cafe Orchestra's "Telephone And Rubber Band", which is played on a telephone and a rubber band (and strings).
  • Spike Jones' version of "You Always Hurt the One You Love", starting at about the minute-and-a-half mark. (And just Spike Jones in general, but that particular song is probably one of the most famous.)
  • The Boston Typewriter Orchestra is a improvisational percussion group that uses nothing but typewriters.
    • Brian Eno included a typewriter solo on his song "China My China."
  • Percussionist Jamie Muir, a former member of King Crimson, often used "found instruments". For example, the screeching noise at the end of "The Talking Drum" was made by blowing into bicycle horn reeds (with the air bulbs removed). Others included a bowl of pistachio nut shells, metal plates, and a large double-handed hand saw.
  • Joe Nanini, the first drummer for Wall of Voodoo, was known for his use of pots and pans as drums, as heard in their sole hit, "Mexican Radio."
  • Einstürzende Neubauten use custom instruments built mostly from scrap metal and industrial tools.
    • To elaborate: their liner notes list everything they use from styrofoam to a jet turbine. On one early track, they added percussion by attaching microphones to Blixa Bargeld's body and having N U Unruh beat him up. Their dance club-ready song "Zampano" is made entirely out of springs, pneumatic pistons and air horns.
  • Depeche Mode were listening to Einsturzende Neubauten around 1983 and happened to have just bought a Synclavier sample machine. Half of that year's album, aptly titled Construction Time Again, consisted of samples of random stuff being hit or dropped. One track was recorded in a warehouse next to a railyard so you have trains going by and getting manipulated into melodies.
    • The drums of one of their most famous songs, "Personal Jesus", was created by jumping on their instrument cases.
  • Negativland was an experimental music band known for using various non-musical sounds as an integral part of their music, though with some songs the "music" designation is questionable.
  • Xoc and Heavy Friends' music is created by the eponymous "heavy friends" sending sending any sound they like to Xoc, who then assembles them. This naturally results in the occasional use of non-standard instruments, such as drills, combs, and people reading software license agreements.
  • Music for the ballet "Parade", composed by Erik Satie (known for his gentle, contemplative style), had a typewriter and pistol, among other things, added to it by the ballet's writer Jean Cocteau. Satie was not amused.
  • Avant-garde composer György Ligeti (often heard in the films of Stanley Kubrick) wrote "Poéme Symphonique for 100 Metronomes", wherein one hundred metronomes are fully wound, set to different tempos, and released simultaneously to tick away until they have all wound down.
  • On Radney Foster's first album, the percussionist plays a tire iron.
  • On Big & Rich's debut single "Wild West Show", the percussionist shakes a peanut can at the end.
  • Dolly Parton clicks her fingernails rhythmically on "9 to 5".
  • Matmos is well-known for making music out of found sounds. On one album they only used squicky medical sounds—just guess what the songs "California Rhinoplasty" and "Lipo Studio" sample most.
    • "For Felix (And All The Rats)" from the same album - A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure - uses the bowed bars of their deceased pet rat's cage as the primary sound source. It is truly heartbreaking.
  • This is basically the entire premise of the group Stomp.
  • The Blue Man Group actually builds their own instruments out of PVC piping and other materials. That "swishing" noise you hear on some of their songs ("Utne Wire Man" most notably) is really just them swinging really long aerials.
    • It's worth noting that the liner notes for Audio go into detail on how they assemble their instruments... and mention one of their failures.
  • Slipknot includes whacking beer kegs with baseball bats in their percussion arsenal (see the videos for "Duality", "Psychosocial", and "Sulfur").
  • The Lumberjack. Say what you want about Jackyl, that song is badass.
  • Panda Bear of Animal Collective seemed to enjoy sampling various noises, along with traditional musical instruments, on his solo album Person Pitch.
  • Can't forget the bicycle bell solo in "Bicycle Race" by Queen.
    • And Seaside Rendezvous, with the incredible solo of band members faking trumpets and the shoetapping with fingers and bottle caps. Yes, it's true.
  • Cleaning Women, whose instruments of choice were amplified laundry drying racks.
  • Sleepytime Gorrila Museum has a lot of homemade instruments such as the Electric Pancreas, the Lever-Action Lever, and Thing.
  • ACDC has cannons.
    • The 1812 Overture.
    • "Wellington's Victory," one of Ludwig van Beethoven's least-known orchestral works, which calls for cannon shots and musket fire from two sides.
  • The Vienna Vegetable Orchestra does exactly what their name suggests. (After concerts they turn the instruments into soup.)
  • "Breaking the Girl" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers has a solo played on pieces of scrap metal.
  • "Driving In My Car" by Madness has a melody of engine noises, car horns, bicycle bells and tools on car parts.
  • One of Frank Zappa's earliest TV appearances had him playing the Bicycle on the Steve Allen show.
    • He even tries to get Allen invloved with it. By the way, can you believe that's Frank?
  • Guns N' Roses' "Dead Horse" features a nutcracker.
  • Apparently the metallic bangs in the Terminator theme were done by Brad Fiedel hitting the microphone with a frying pan.
  • Concerto for Horn and Hardart by P.D.Q. Bach. The "Hardart" of the title is a musical instrument in which each note is produced by a different method: bell, whistle, plucked string, popped balloon, etc.
    • It is written (by Prof. Schickele) that the wine bottle was the instrument that P.D.Q. Bach was most accomplished at playing; his cantata Iphegenia in Brooklyn has idiomatic solos written for it. Other instruments for which P.D.Q. Bach composed include the windbreaker (which is not a jacket but a series of mailing tubes), the double reed slide music stand, the left-handed sewer flute, the bicycle (with handlebars and siren), balloons, the lasso d'amore, the double reed hookah, the pastaphone, etc.
      • Most impressively, some of his pieces were written for the Oscar Meyer Wiener Whistle, several centuries before the advent of the Oscar Meyer Wiener.
  • Lucas Abela has used, among other things, amplified plate glass, bits of steel, homemade turntables, and amplified needles. He once took it one step further by releasing an album that he claims was composed and performed entirely by his Volkswagen.
  • Various things are used as instruments in many Songs to Wear Pants To songs, like spoons and the sound of the toilet flushing
  • A popular instrument for people wanting to invoke this trope is the cactus. for example. This video demonstrates some of the different sounds you can get when playing the cactus.
  • The rhythm section of Havalina's "Murder" includes a metal library cart being beaten within an inch of its life.
  • Anathallo, on the album Floating World, used sounds of shuffling cards and rattling chains as percussion. And, while everybody and their mom has used hand-clapping before, Anathallo's use in "A Song for Christine" goes Up to Eleven
  • The entire album Gizmodgery by Self features songs composed only using toy instruments.
  • The album Hidden by These New Puritans has foley recordings made by the band of clashing swords, rattling chains, shattering glass, guns being cocked, and a melon wrapped in cheese crackers being hit with a mallet to simulate the sound of a crushed human head(!) all used as percussion.
  • Artis the Spoonman is a street performer who is known for using a set of spoons as his instruments. He has since been featured on many musician's songs, most notably the Soundgarden song named after him, "Spoonman."
  • In his earlier years, Beck often employed a Gameboy to make noise music.
    • During one tour, he'd play "Clap Hands" on acoustic guitar, while his backing band sat around a small dinner table and provided percussion by rhythmically banging on silverware with utensils. The studio version uses more normal instrumentation though.
  • The intro to "Hardware Store" by "Weird Al" Yankovic features a hammer, an unspecified power tool, and a hand saw.
  • Japanese musician 黒電話666 (Literally, "Black phone 666") uses old telephones (known for the black plastic used to make them) as well as various custom-made phones from various like-minded artists.
  • Various noise musicians, most notably Merzbow, have built their own instruments out of scrap metal and other junk materials.
  • The Siouxie and the Banshees song Red Light uses a camera as a instrument to great effect.
  • Angelspit love this trope and use it often.
  • Alan Jackson strikes a hammer against an anvil on "Hard Hat and a Hammer."
  • A band called Clayhill (supporting Beth Orton), whose set included a track called "Weird Beard" which required somebody to play a pair of scissors.
  • Tilly And The Wall earn credit for ditching the drummer and having their rhythm provided by Jamie Presnall's tap dancing.
  • M.I.A. used drills as percussion on "Steppin Up."
  • On Björk's Vespertine (in which Matmos played a role in the programming), there are various sampled sounds, like shuffling cards on "Cocoon" and "Hidden Place", snow being walked upon on "Aurora", and ice being cracked and smashed on "Frosti."
  • CDR has done this on and off since he began. He's done tracks with tape machines, squeaky toys, bits of cellophane and other things.
  • Nicolash, to the point where the list of instruments can be several lines long and include such things as sticks, tables, cellular phones, mp3 players, water bottles, candy wrappers, and his own jacket.
  • All Psapp songs are made using toys.
  • Entertainment for the Braindead sometimes employs kitchen utensils, salt shakers, and drawers as instruments. She also uses actual instruments in non-standard ways, such as using a guitar or banjo as percussion.
  • Subverted with Paul Gilbert, who has been known to use a power drill with picks strapped to it for some real fast strumming, though Eddie Van Halen made the drill + guitar equation more famous in the intro to "Poundcake" (he didn't touch the strings with it, just so you know - it was the electrical interference that produced the sound.
    • Van Halen has also used car horns ("Runnin' With the Devil") and car revving ("Panama").
  • This techno song made using the sounds from a Jeep.
  • "Blades" by Pig used sounds of knife sharpening.
  • Infocalypse uses weird samples. On album "Raygun Gothic" this includes adjusting radio receiver and telegraph keys (or synthesizer emulating these), and "Jam the Death Star" is a whole song performed on two keys—in stereo.
  • Ween's "Never Squeal" features a chainsaw solo.
  • The Paper Chase used scissors as the percussion in "We Know Where You Sleep".
  • The Bonzo Dog Band was very much of this trope - one instrumental has the call-out "New horizons in sound now as Roger plays a solo on the electric shirt collar!"
  • The piano player on Mary Chapin Carpenter's debut album shakes a Cream of Wheat can on one track.
  • The whole premise of The Lost And Found Orchestra
  • Gerard Hoffnung: "Compositions specially commissioned for the Festivals included Malcolm Arnold's A Grand, Grand Overture, Op. 57 [2] which was dedicated to U.S. President Herbert Hoover and was scored for several vacuum cleaners and other domestic appliances." [1]
  • Motograter. Instead of a bass guitar, they used the Motograter; it is made of industrial cable and guitar parts. It's played by hitting the cables with a drumstick and tightening or loosening them to create different notes. Seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hOExrLVKj0
  • The Spinto Band have performed a version of their song "Later On" entirely using silverware, utensils, and food.
  • At a time long before synthesizers were even realistically possible, let alone affordable, The Silver Apples were making electronic music using a home made instrument nicknamed the Simeon. Essentially just a collection of 30 something oscillators tuned to different pitches and triggered using telegraph keys, playing it required using ones hands, feet AND elbows. Oh, and the guy playing it was also the singer. A detailed schematic of the instrument is supplied in the liner notes for their eponymous album, as well as a breakdown of the drummers (equally impressive) drum kit.
  • The Vaselines' "Molly's Lips" features a bicycle horn in the chorus. In recent live performances they typically get someone from the opening act to sit in on bicycle horn.
  • OK Go's Chevrolet-sponsored video for "Needing/Getting" involves the band playing the song with a car. The main way this is done is with retractable pneumatic arms on the vehicle, which strike carefully arranged and "tuned" objects as the band drive by them. There are some very unconventionally-used pianos and guitars involved, but mostly these are things like barrels, steel poles, and tires.
  • A few songs on Nirvana's Nevermind (most notably the instrumental breakdown in "Drain You") feature some toys Kurt Cobain brought to the studio.
  • Charlie McDonnel, i.e. Charlieissocoollike, uses a box of buttons, a toy TARDIS, a clothes iron, and other such 'instruments' in "A Song About Love."
  • The album Strange Cargo by David Van Tieghem is undoubtedly named for the massive list of instruments used its creation, from the self-explanatory "assorted scrap metal" to the beguiling "amplified tennis racket".
  • Keith Urban plays, among other instruments, a cardboard box on "Somebody Like You".

Literature

  • In "The Last Illusion," a short story by Clive Barker, a bunch of demons kill some humans and creatively dismember them to turn them into playable musical instruments, including a lyre and a set of bagpipes.

Live Action TV

"Ladies and gentlemen, I give you on the mouse organ: The Bells of St Mary's."

    • On their "Interesting People" sketch, they had "The March of the Men of Harlech", peformed on bicycle bells.
  • The Muppet Show has "the beloved" Marvin Suggs and his Muppaphone, made up of talking fuzzballs who go "Ow!" in tune as Marvin hits them.
    • When Buddy Rich guest starred, he performed an extended percussion piece from his dressing room to his drum kit. In his own words, "When I play a theatre, I play the theatre!"
  • Joey D'Auria - the second and last Bozo on WGN-TV - did a bit called "Doctor Flamo" on The Gong Show of the pig organ/mouse organ/Muppaphone variety: he held his hand over candles of vaious heights, his own screams of pain were the melody of the tune in question ("Love in Bloom" as I recall).
  • Penn & Teller's Smoke & Mirrors (unreleased videogame) had a level which aurally imitated the aforementioned The Typewriter except as an arcade shooter instead of a typewriter.
  • The Late Show often had these kinds of acts - one had glass soft drink bottles which they stuck their fingers in and popped out for the sound.
  • Top Gear once had a segment when James May recreated the theme song using the exhaust sounds from various car engines.
  • The opening theme of Are You Being Served started with cash register sounds forming a melody. This was a couple years before Pink Floyd's "Money".
  • Some of the percussion "instruments" in the score from Lost are pieces of the original airplane from the pilot.
  • An All That sketch about a school music class with its funding cut had characters playing erasers, sneezes, mud, sandwiches, and even their own tongues (bowed with a ruler). Partially subverted in that their performance sounds awful on the first try, until Amanda Bynes retunes her tongue, and then they start sounding like a symphony orchestra.
  • Wall$treetWeeks theme used a teletype machine.
  • Complusive clubber Tyres from Spaced imagined a dance track from the phone ringing, the kettle boiling, the clock ticking and other incidental sounds. Later, he's dancing to the beeping on pedestrian crossing.
  • In on Episode the Cylon Theme in Battlestar Galactica' was played on pots, pans, and a toaster.
  • In Lost, Michael Giacchino used some pieces of the destroyed plane used for the Oceanic 815 wreckage for percussive sounds.
  • On a few episodes of Home Improvement, the K&B Construction Crew would appear on Tool Time to perform a musical number using mostly tools such as power saws, wrenches, screwdrivers, and an actual musical saw.
  • In a joke episode of New Zealand farming TV show Country Calendar, a wire fence was used as a set of orchestral strings.
  • One of the later themes for the BBC show Food and Drink was "Food, Glorious Food" from Oliver! performed on saucepans and other kitchenalia.
    • The tension music used for the announcement of the winner on Great British Menu is also performed on utensils.

New Media

Radio

  • Sometimes heard on A Prairie Home Companion. The sound effects man can, for example, simulate the sound of a song being quacked by a duck or played on a pneumatic drill.
  • B&Q, a hardware chain in the UK, ran a radio advertising campaign with E. Grieg's "Morning" from Peer Gynt played on power tools.

Tabletop Games

  • In Demon: The Fallen, a true name can be this as one of the novels shows. One demon's true name is the sound of a hundred crows cawing "Don't Fear the Reaper" by Blue Oyster Cult.

Video Games

  • In We Love Katamari, the track "Sunbaked Savanna" is a medley of songs from the first game rescored with animal noises and tribal drums.
  • The soundtrack for Conkers Bad Fur Day had a track called Pooland, that was a a jazz song played with... ahem... colon trumpets.
  • In one video of Super Mario World, a series of hack-created stages are set up so that Mario's movements (Automatic Level due to the design of the stage) play various videogame themes.
  • Team Fortress 2: A common Memetic Mutator, fans often take the sound effects (like the Scout's "BONK!") and make music of it. The Mario 1-1 theme and the Mortal Kombat theme are two of the most popular.
    • The Super Mario Bros. theme has been played on virtually every instrument ever, and some things that are not (normally) instruments as well.
    • And then there are those that take it even further.
    • Ahem.
  • The boss theme "Death and Honor" from MadWorld uses a chainsaw for counterharmony in the chorus.
  • Searching for an "urban" sound in the soundtrack of In Famous, the composers hit tubas with wire brushes and plucked bungie cords against bass drums, along with the cellist making his notes wind up and down like an engine. The result sounds appropriately atmospheric.
  • With exception of the beat, a song entirely made of Pokémon cries.
  • In Tales of Monkey Island Chapter 3: Lair of the Leviathan, Noogie plays the manatee bile sacs like bongos, and playing them wildly can cause the bile to rise up.
  • In World of Goo, the creators admit to using cardboard boxes and chairs for the game's percussion.

Western Animation

  • The Classic Disney Short Symphony Hour. Mickey Mouse conducts a flawless rendition of Von Suppe's "Light Cavalry Overture" while auditioning for a radio show. Before the big broadcast, Goofy accidentally drops all the instruments down the elevator, and the performance ends up sounding like Spike Jones.
    • In Steamboat Willie, after getting a goat that ate some sheet music to play "Turkey in the Straw", he proceeds to play out the melody on as many things as he can find. He runs out of inanimate things fairly quickly, and then proceeds to play it on a yowling cat (because he's pulling its tail), a duck, a group of feeding piglets by pulling their tails, the mother pig the piglets were feeding like an accordion and finally the teeth of a cow as if they were a xylophone.
  • Nelson Muntz did another version in a talent contest on The Simpsons: He had a row of nerds, he wedgied them to create the notes.
  • The junkyard instruments used by Fat Albert and his friends.
  • On Family Guy, one of the flashback gags had Peter and Michael Moore sitting in adjacent bathroom stalls... farting out "Dueling Banjos".
  • The Beatles had a Running Gag of Ringo Starr playing the drums on things besides drums: skulls, sea creatures, etc.
  • The Triplets of Belleville. Cabaret jazz played on newspapers, vacuum cleaners, and bicycle spokes? Sold.
  • Phineas and Ferb have the titular characters on a holiday reformatory school in "Phineas and Ferb Get Busted", starting a tune by brushing the floor with a toothbrush.
    • And don't forget about Marty the Rabbit Boy and his Musical Blender!
    • Sherman of "Love Händel" performs "I Ain't Got Rythm" in a library by stamping and thumping books, accompanied by the boys and background people rattling cups, slamming books and clapping.
    • Candace performs "Queen of Mars" on... her martian subjects. She later complains that "Every part of their bodies is an instrument, and they never invented music! Martians are lame!"
  • The Smurflings in The Smurfs upstaged Brainy's orchestral performance in one story (and episode) with music from instruments made of junk.

Web Comics

  • Cartilage Head of Achewood fame uses what is probably a cello bow to play a large saw.
  • Referenced in At The Heart Of It All, with the mention of a band who "played music by throwing chainsaws down stairways into flaming pianos".

Real Life

  • The "jug band" of American folk music is built around this concept, using instruments made from common rural household items such as jugs, washboards, wash tubs, kazoos (comb and tissue paper), saws, and spoons. Before using spoons, the Irish played animal bones in the same manner.
  • The pig organ. The idea was that pushing a key on the organ would pull a pig's tail, making it squeal.
  • Josef Pujol performed under the stage name "Le Petomane" at the Moulin Rouge in the 1890s. The name means essentially "The Farting Maniac", and that's exactly what he did. From The Other Wiki:

Some of the highlights of [Pujol's] stage act involved sound effects of cannon fire and thunderstorms, as well as playing 'O Sole Mio' and 'La Marseillaise' on an ocarina through a rubber tube in his anus.

  • The Musical Road in Lancaster, CA.
  • There are several "singing bridges" which make a singing noise when driven over.
  • Tuned Tesla coils, affectionately known as "Zeusaphones."
  • Hand farting.
  • Car engines have been used to play tunes.
  • Techno Jeep.
  • This street performer using a bunch of buckets and other things to make a drum set.
  • A two slot toaster and a pair of forks.
  • Michael Iceberg's composition Pigs in the Wind used the titular sounds to make a concerto.
  • The Infernal Noise Brigade, an anti-globalization, anti-consummerist marching band, preferred to make their "instruments" out of trash as part of their message.
  • The musical piece "4'33"", by John Cage, was essentially intended to be the sound of the audience getting annoyed at him sitting in front of the piano like a lemon for the four-and-a-half minutes of the piece. Modern audiences are in on the joke, though, rather ruining the effect.
  • The General MIDI standard defines programs 119 through 127 as the sound effects Reverse Cymbal, Guitar Fret Noise, Breath Noise, Seashore, Bird Tweet, Telephone Ring, Helicopter, Applause and Gunshot, respectively.
  • Wine glasses. When rubbed correctly, they can produce chillingly beautiful music.
  • It's very likely that this was how instruments came to being in the first place, as the first proto-humans experimented with the objects around them and what sounds they made.
  • The Vegetable Orchestra uses vegetables as instruments. They constantly have to make new ones because they eventually rot, but when they finish, they make them into a soup to serve to the audience.
  • The BBC Radiophonic Workshop quite possibly deserve an entire subcategory of their own. Their task was to create strange sound effects for various BBC productions, but were seen as legitimate mad scientists by the company. The BBC even initially had a policy of not allowing anybody to work in the section for longer than 6 months, out of a genuine fear that it would drive people insane.
    • They're probably most famous for the original Dr. Who theme tune and the shows sound effects. The iconic bassline was created using an ordinary rubber band, played back at different speeds to get the correct pitches, while the main synth was created using a basic oscillator used for testing broadcast lines and a similar amount of tape editing. The individual tape splices, each roughly an inch in length, were stuck together to create the tune as a whole, then played back on 4 different tape machines as they didn't have the capability for multi-track recording at the time. Overall, around 2 miles of tape were used, each stuck together an inch at a time.
    • Ron Grainer, the guy who originally composed the theme, is reported to have asked "did I write that?" when he was first show the results, to which Delia Derbyshire (the engineer responsible) replied "most of it". Grainer was so impressed by their efforts that he lobbied the BBC to list Derbyshire as a co-composer, thus entitling her to a share of the royalties. The BBC declined, as at the time they still viewed the Workshop as a "sound effects" department and refused to credit them as musicians.
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