Replicating The World’s Oldest Stringed Instrument

August 21, 2025 by Tyler August 10 Comments

Posts on Hackaday sometimes trend a little bit retro, but rarely do we cover hacks that reach back into the Bronze Age. Still, when musician [Peter Pringle] put out a video detailing how he replicated an ancient Sumerian instrument, we couldn’t wait to dig in.

The instrument in question is the “Golden Lyre of Ur”, and it was buried at the Royal Cemetery of Ur with a passel of other grave goods (including a Silver Lyre) something around 4400 to 4500 years ago. For those not in the know, Ur was an early Sumerian city in the part of Mesopotamia became modern-day Iraq. A lyre is a type of plucked stringed instrument, similar to a harp.

That anything of the instrument remains after literal millennia buried under the Mesopotamian sand is thanks to the

This representation was unearthed in the same dig as the remains of the Golden Lyre and its silver sister.

extensive ornamentation on the original lyre– the gut strings and wooden body might have rotted away, but the precious stones and metals adorning the lyre preserved the outline of the instrument until it was excavated in 1922. Reconstruction was also greatly aided by contemporary mosaics and pottery showing similar lyres.

For particular interest are the tuning pegs, which required that artistic inspiration to recreate– the original archeological dig did not find any evidence of the tuning mechanism. [Peter] spends some time justifying his reconstruction, using both practical engineering concerns (the need for tension to get good sound) and the pictographic evidence. The wide “buzzing” bridge matches the pictographic evidence as well, and gives the lyre a distinct, almost otherworldly sound to Western ears. [Peter]’s reconstruction sounds good, though we have no way of knowing if it matches what you’d have heard in the royal halls of Ur all those dusty centuries ago. (Skip to 17:38 in the video below if you just want to hear it in action.)

The closest thing to this ancient, man-sized lyre we’ve seen on Hackaday before might be one of the various laser harp projects we’ve featured over the years. If you squint a little, you can see the distant echo of the Golden Lyre of Ur in at least some of them. We also can’t help but note that the buzzing bridge gives the Sumerian lyre a certain droning quality not entirely unlike a hurdy-gurdy, because we apparently can’t have a musical post without mentioning the hurdy-gurdy.

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The Tape Speed Keyboard

August 4, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 10 Comments

For those who experienced any part of the 1960s, even if it’s just experiencing the music from that era here in the future, the sound of the Mellotron is immediately recognizable. The Moody Blues were famous for using the tape-based instrument, and the Beatles and David Bowie produced hits with it as well. It’s haunting sounds are still highly prized today, but the complexity, cost, and maintenance requirement for the tape loops and other moving parts can put many musicians off from owning one. But [Japhy Riddle] has built an instrument without these downsides called the Tape Speed Keyboard.

Unlike the Mellotron which used a tape loop for each of its keys, the Tape Speed Keyboard uses only a single cassette tape. As the name implies, it changes the pitch of the sound by modulating the speed of the single tape housed in its own tape deck. The keyboard itself started off life as a Casio MT-35 but since this is a completely analog instrument, it was rewired so each key is connected to a potentiometer whose output voltage is tuned to a specific tape speed. [Japhy] reports that this is similar to tuning an analog piano and the process can be equally temperamental.

With everything electronic working, [Japhy] turned to making this a more acceptable musical instrument. Predictably, turning the motor on and off for each key press came with a bit of delay, causing the sound to come out goofy and muddy. To solve this problem he changed the design to make the tape play continuously rather than start and stop for a key press, and then modified other keys to be on-off switches for sound output. Since cassette tapes have two sides, he can also play either of two sounds in this way.

With the final polish on, the Tape Speed Keyboard is able to produce completely unique compositions that separate it from even the venerable Mellotron. Be sure to check out the video linked below to hear its sound. There have been plenty of other musical projects based around tape decks as well, including this one inspired by the original Mellotron and this tape deck-based guitar effects pedal.

Thanks to [splashbun] for the tip!

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A 100-Year-Old Electronic Musical Instrument Brought Back To Life

May 27, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 35 Comments

In the early years of electrification, when electricity was beginning to shape the modern world, this new technology was being put to use in many more places than turning motors and providing lighting. Some things we can see as obvious missteps like electrified corsets marketed as health tonics or x-ray treatments for eye strain, but others ended up being fascinating bits of technology with interesting uses, many of which have been largely forgotten since. This 100-year-old musical instrument is squarely in the latter category, and this build brings the sound of it back to life.

The instrument was called the Luminaphone and was originally built by [Harry Grindell Matthews]. Of course, this was an age before transistors and many other things we take for grated, so it has some quirks that we might not otherwise expect from a musical instrument. The device generated sound by shining a series of lights through a perforated rotating disc at a selenium cell. The selenium cell was an early photoresistor, generating current corresponding to the amount of light falling on it. A keyboard activated different lights, shining on areas of the disc with different numbers of holes, causing differing sounds to be produced by the instrument.

The recreation was built by [Nick Bild] and uses a laser diode as a stand-in for the rotating disc, but since it can be modulated in a similar way the idea is that the photodiode used as a receiver would generate a similar sound. The recreation sounds a bit like a video game from the 8-bit era, but with no recordings or original Luminaphones surviving to the present day we may never know how accurate it is. There are some other electronic instruments still around today, though, and plenty of ways of DIY-ing their sound like this project which recreates the tonewheels of the classic Hammond organ.

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3D Print (and Play!) The Super Mario Tune As A Fidget Toy

April 4, 2025 by Donald Papp 34 Comments

[kida] has a highly innovative set of 3D-printable, musical fidget toys that play classic video game tunes. Of course there’s the classic Super Mario ditty, but there’s loads more. How they work is pretty nifty, and makes great use of a 3D printer’s strengths.

To play the device one uses a finger to drag a tab (or striker) across the top, and as it does so it twangs vertical tines one-by-one. Each tine emits a particular note — defined by how tall the thicker part is — and plays a short tune as a result. Each one plays a preprogrammed melody, with the tempo and timing up to the user. Listen to them in action in the videos embedded just under the page break!

There are some really clever bits to the design. One is that the gadget is made in two halves, which effectively doubles the notes one can fit into the space. Another is that it’s designed so that holding it against something like a tabletop makes it louder because the surface acts like a sounding board. Finally, the design is easily modified so making new tunes is easy. [kida]’s original design has loads of non-videogame tunes (like the Jeopardy! waiting theme) as well as full instructions on making your very own versions.

Fidget toys are a niche all their own when it comes to 3D printed devices. The fidget knife has a satisfying snap action to it, and this printable linear toggle design is practically a fidget toy all on its own.

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Jangle Box Plucks Strings At The Press Of A Button

August 21, 2024 by Tom Nardi 4 Comments

There are some that enjoy the human element of a musical performance, delighting in the unique way an artist teases the desired sound from their instruments. Then there are those of us who listen to random bleeps, bloops, and buzzes tortured out of some crusty sound chip pulled from an 8-bit computer. It’s all very subjective.

It seems to us that the Jangle Box, created by [Rich Bernett], lands somewhere in the middle. A human is still playing the instrument, but they aren’t directly touching the strings. Instead, buttons and a potentiometer on the front of the device are used to control four small hobby motors that slap their respective strings with what appears to be the remnants of plastic propellers — we’d guess these motors were pulled from cheap personal fans. Standard guitar tuner knobs can be used to adjust the tension of each string, providing further control over the sounds produced by the device.

In the video below, [Rich] briefly explains the operation of the Jangle Box, and then launches into a performance of sorts. The goal here really isn’t to “play” the instrument in the traditional sense. Rather, he records the various noises it produces, normalizes them, and sorts them into a full octave of notes so he can use them in future compositions. The last few minutes of the video contain some electronic beats made up of the samples created from the Jangle Box.

If you’re one of his Patreon supporters you can download the sample pack yourself, otherwise, you’ll have to make your own version of the instrument to get your hands on that electro-tangy sound.

This isn’t the first original [Rich Bernett] musical creation to grace these pages, back in 2020 we covered his Cassettone synth.

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A black guitar with red rings on its body is held by a man in a black shirt. Text pointing to the red ring of guitar picks says, "This spins."

1000 Picks Make For A Weird Guitar

August 6, 2024 by Navarre Bartz 1 Comment

String instruments have a long history in civilization, helping humans make more complex and beautiful music. We wonder what our forebears would think of this guitar strummed with 1000 picks?

[Mattias Krantz] wondered what the best number of picks was to play guitar and took the experiment to its illogical extreme. Starting with zero picks and working up through various 3D printed multi-picks he tests all the feasible combinations of handheld picks.

After that, he switches gears to a fishing rod-actuated system of several picks in a ring. Not pleased with the initial acoustics of the picks in this system, he switched to printing his picks in a more flexible filament to better approximate the characteristics of the human thumb. Finally, he takes us to the undiscovered country of a spinning ring of 1000 picks strumming the underside of the strings and the… interesting acoustic result. As many pointed out in the comments, this blurs the line between a guitar and a hurdy gurdy.

If you want more melodic musical mischief, perhaps try this optical guitar pickup, a $30 guitar build, or get fancy with a 3D printed violin?

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Rotating Necked Guitar Looks Difficult To Play

October 30, 2023 by Richard Baguley 20 Comments

Have you ever looked at a guitar and thought “Nah, that’s way too easy to play.”[Mattias Kranz] seems to have done, so he built the 360 Guitar, a new instrument with a circular, rotating neck. The rotating neck means that it can have more strings than most: we think that it has sixteen, but it’s hard to tell. Anyway, it has a lot of strings and looks utterly impractical, which makes it an exciting project.

The basic idea is intriguing: take a conventional guitar design and replace the fretboard with a rotating pillar. Perhaps even stick a motor in there to rotate it on command. Each of the strings is mounted along this pillar using standard string retainers and tuning pegs, with frets along the pillar. Because you can fit so many strings, you can use all of the standard strings for a bass and treble guitar, plus a few extra like the thickest bass string available and the thinnest guitar strings. It’s like a four-dimensional Chapman Stick.

[Mathias] is still working on the project as you can see in the video below the break, so we will be interested to see what new design aspects he comes up with, like the plan to use a motor to rotate the neck. [Mattias] has built a few instruments that we have featured before, like the Helium guitar, which replaces the resonant cavity with a helium balloon, and the Plasma Piano, a combination of piano and tuned plasma coil.

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