When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a violin.

January 27, 2021 8:07 AM

Nicolas Bras builds a sympathetic nail violin.
posted by cortex (12 comments total)

The idea of trying to fine-tune using a hammer gives me conniption fits... That aside, this was a fascinating video.
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:08 AM on January 27, 2021 [1 favorite]

This is very cool! What an interesting idea. I hope he posts a video of a song with it sometime.
posted by starfishprime at 11:09 AM on January 27, 2021

emerges from youtube hole an hour later and blinks eyes
wow. he does some really interesting things, his PVC pipe whistle performances are awesome. tuning with a hammer kind of reminds me of tuning a kalimba.
posted by th3ph17 at 11:14 AM on January 27, 2021 [1 favorite]

I kind of want to make one!
posted by biogeo at 2:11 PM on January 27, 2021

At the end of the day, everybody looking for someone sympathetic to nail?
posted by leotrotsky at 2:19 PM on January 27, 2021 [2 favorites]

More like nails on a chalkboard. I got the exact same skin crawling sensation when he bowed those nails.
posted by keep_evolving at 2:46 PM on January 27, 2021

If you noped out at the first demonstration of the sound, without the sympathetic nails present, I recommend skipping ahead a bit. The sound with the sympathetic nails present is really quite different and much more musical.
posted by biogeo at 3:41 PM on January 27, 2021

Not to mention having the nails in a semi-enclosed reverberant base instead of a plain piece of board
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:49 PM on January 27, 2021 [1 favorite]

I kind of want to make one!

oh god i kind of want to make one out of a mannequin head so that it looks like Pinhead from Hellraiser
posted by cortex at 6:34 PM on January 27, 2021 [2 favorites]

do it
posted by biogeo at 7:40 PM on January 27, 2021

Fun! I made a kalimba during lockdown. Unfortunately, actual musical ability did not follow, but it's fun to play around with.
posted by Harald74 at 3:29 AM on January 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

The problem he's solving made me think of Chladni plates. You'd probably get some interesting improvements to the sound by moving the nails so the spacings are more dependent on the frequencies of each nail, but given that the weight of the nails is significant I haven't got the faintest idea of how you'd approach that.
posted by regularfry at 3:29 AM on January 28, 2021