BART HOPKIN: Acoustic Sound design
Awhile ago I came across a channel that has completely fascinated me for a few years now, Bart Hopkin creates dozens of hand crafted experimental acoustic instruments. What makes his instruments particularly special is each one plays with the physical properties of main tone generating medium in unique ways. His designs often connect tone generating mediums to one another, or alter the strings or tines in ways that shift partials or add unique buzzing qualities to the sounds. In many ways, they are like physical versions of Physical Audio plugins. His designs are a wealth of inspiration for sonic ideas and below are three examples of instruments that take sound design into the physical realm.
SMOKED PAPRIKA
One instrument, named Smoked Paprika, is quite an interesting contraption. It uses bars attached to strings to generate tone. Each bar hangs freely from a unique string, the strings are tuned and in tension to produce resonate frequencies related to each bar. On top on this, the bars are bent and have notches cut into them to produce unique overtones. If I’m understanding correctly, the placement of each notch can tune and shift the overtones of the bar, which should have its own unique partials already compared to a string. This combination of unique timbres and resonance add up to an incredibly rich sound unlike any other acoustic instrument
You can read more about Smoked Paprika here: https://barthopkin.com/smoked-paprika/
THE U
Another of his creations, the U, has been sampled by SoundIron and turned into a virtual instrument. The U is quite an astonishing sight, a large U shaped metal bar, with dozens of rods, or “tines”, poking through the side walls. The tines are arranged into 12 groups of 14, each grouping oh tines covers 4 octaves of a chromatic note with some fifths thrown in for good measure. Playing is done with thin plectrum like you’d use for an oud, these are strummed across the tines creating a cascading raking sound for each note. The other tines resonate sympathetically to produce a subtle and sweet reverberation.
The U is available as a Kontakt instrument from Sound Iron: https://soundiron.com/products/hopkin-instrumentarium-the-u
You can read more about The U here: https://barthopkin.com/u/
TRILLIUM CLUSER
Finally, perhaps my favorite of his creations is the Trillium Cluster, a stringed acoustic instrument with the most unique twist. Instead lining up strings in parallel like a harp, zither, or lute, the Trillium Cluster connects sets of three strings together in “Y” shaped formations. These groupings of strings resonate and pull on one another to produce chord like tones. What is interesting is that each grouping doesn’t quite sound like a chord, I suspect that the physical connection of each string in a group causes creates such strong cohesion between the tones that the results sound more like strong overtones rather than separated notes, perhaps there is some physical property that forces enough phase alignment to make them sound like a singular sound. A cut out is conveniently placed to allow space for a small bottle to be used as a slide, applying this slide to one of the strings in a cluster allows you to tune and play with the resulting overtones. The over all sound of this instrument is rather atonal and a bit dull, but it’s such a unique experiment in acoustic properties, I’d love to see this explored more, perhaps with larger strings, or different variations of clusters.
You can read more about Trillium Cluster here: https://barthopkin.com/instrumentarium/trillium-cluster/
I find these acoustic experiments fascinating, there’s so much to explore in the world of sound design, there are so many acoustic instruments that have yet to be thought up. Synthesizers are great for sound design, but they lack many of these acoustic properties, and even the best physical modeling is still designed around single resonating mediums. The unique timbres and overtones also lead to unique music and scales,
It’s important to note that these instruments are not simply unique, but categorically unique as they produce completely novel timbres and overtones in new ways. These aren’t just strings connected to weird objects, abstract percussion sculptures, or already existing instruments that are only redesigned in visual or superficial ways. I don’t mean this to dismiss or diminish other instrument creators. It takes a lot to build any instrument, let alone unique and abstract ones. I just want to specify how unique these are, in that these are at their core exploring unique acoustic properties that I haven’t seen elsewhere.
Be sure to explore Bart Hopkin’s incredible collection of instrument designs here: https://barthopkin.com/instrumentarium/