Freshmen to Make Music from Designs of Note: Old Appliances Turned into Instruments

First-year design students in the University of Cincinnati’s top-ranked architecture and interior design programs are learning the score on creativity in an unusual assignment that required them to design and construct musical instruments from old dishwashers, refrigerators and stoves.

The students, from UC's 

College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning,

fine tuned their design skills by fashioning woodwinds (well, “metal-“ or “plasticwinds” really), horns, chimes, bells, whistles, drums, and a symphony of string instruments like guitars, harps, xylophones and zithers.

While each student worked individually to create an instrument, each is also part of a group.  There are 18 groups in all, and each group has written an original composition to be performed at a free, public concert (with choreography and lighting) set for 6:30 p.m., Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2004, in Room 4400 (the auditorium), DAAP.  It’s expected that the compositions and choreography will range from the comic to the surprisingly sophisticated. 

That fact is causing a little stage fright after the fun of disemboweling the appliances.  “The best part so far was the fun of taking our dishwasher apart.  It’s a ‘figure-it-out’ experiment.  We didn’t need to worry about putting it back together,” said Jamie Franz of Tampa, Fl., who’s experimented with making a string instrument – whether it be more harp or zither – from the body casing of an oven range exhaust fan and the stove’s wiring.

But now, Nate Morgan of Colerain Township feels the pressure.  “It’s an individual design,” he explained, “But it all has to work together in the group.  And we’ll be giving a live performance.  That means everyone is trying harder.”

That’s music for his teachers’ ears since the idea behind the assignment is to challenge students to perceive their environment and the world with new eyes and ears.  “We can learn a lot about visual design issues from other arts and from what we see every day,” states James Postell, associate professor of interior design.  He added, “We can learn design from music, writing, movies, dramas, cuisine, buildings and from appliances too.  Interior design and architecture are very similar to music.  All require compositions that grow from individual, component parts.”

To bring that lesson home, the students had to carefully draw in detail every component of their respective appliances and then trace the objects on paper.  Said Mary Carroll-Coelho of Boston, “I’m definitely looking at things differently.  I now look at buildings to see where the ventilation system is, the pipes, plumbing and other systems.  I was noticing tile on the floor the other day and thinking how the tiles didn’t line up.”  She’s making wearable chimes made from the inner metal door of a dishwasher.

Lisa Zaragoza of Waukegan, Il., agreed with her classmate, “I now understand how a dishwasher works.  I know now that it’s important to know how things work before designing.  I’d never thought about how dishwashers and other things worked before.  I took it for granted.”  Zaragoza is making a string instrument from rubber bands and a dishwasher’s utensil holders.

Orchestrating the UC studio – where passerbys can hear experimental tooting of such simple favorites as “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” – are  Gulen Cevik, adjunct assistant professor of interior design; Dennis Mann, professor of architecture; James Postell, associate professor of interior design; David Lee Smith, professor of architecture; Marc Swackhamer, assistant professor of architecture; and Melanie Swick, adjunct professor of architecture. 

Other instruments:

• Donald Mouch of White Oak created a trumpet from a dishwasher’s motor, featuring a pipe mouthpiece.

• Shannon Ulis of New Philadelphia, Ohio, created a long, flexible, plastic horn from dishwasher tubing that she’ll drape over her body.

• Robert Till of Avon, Ind., who has a good deal of musical experience, made a “plasticwind”

out of dishwasher tubing.  The final product will look like nothing so much as a two-headed saxophone.  One head will produce the full octave of notes while the other will produce a constant tone.  Said Till, “Probably, the most challenging part of the project is that there’s no going back.  I have the material I have to work with, and once I cut it, it’s cut.  There’s no testing it before you begin to design.”

• Julia Weiss of Findlay, Ohio, designed a large, bass drum from the inner frame of a dishwasher.  She said, “Disassembling the appliances was a great way of finding what was behind the functioning…just so long as we didn’t have to put them back together.”