When it comes to making music, if you want to write something that goes way outside conventional music and beyond what Western scales have to offer, sometimes the instruments available to us just aren’t enough. Whether it’s John Cage putting objects on his piano strings to make new sounds, or Kraftwerk building synths because contemporary technology wasn’t up to their vision, artists have been pushing the boundaries of what they can play for years.
Form the skin-activated Dermatron to the brainwaves-reading Electroencephalophone, these are nine instruments that throw aside everything you thought you knew about music and how to play it. We also want to mess around with them – badly.
If you like these, check out some of the other, even more unconventional instruments we’ve covered before here.