9 experimental homemade instruments that we want to play now

This is exactly what it sounds like. Contact mics are attached to parts of a cactus which capture the player's tones as they are modified by the plant's shapes and contours. John Cage wrote two amplified plant albums himself, Child of Tree (1975) and Branches (1976).

Composer and musical philosopher Harry Partch was tired of the limitations presented by a 12-tone Western scale, so he made The Chromeldion, with a practically unimaginable 43 tones. It was capable of playing historical scales from other cultures that have otherwise been lost to time.

The Canadian musician Bruce Haack made a lot of instruments. The coolest one is the Dermatron. Through touch and heat, it generates tones that correspond with touching human flesh. In the clip below, Haack lets Mister Rogers play him like a drum.

Dutch composer and ex-artistic director of the Studio for Electro Instrumental Music (STEIM), Michel Waisvisz, incorporated the body into instruments. The kraakdors, or cracklebox, is a portable device that forms a circuit with the player when touched, activating its oscillator.

Invented by Allan Gittler, this guitar strips the guitar of material acoustic properties and relies entirely on electronics. There's no body, only a slim metal neck, and minimalistic tuning knobs. Despite being used by The Police on "Synchronicity II," its sonic capabilities have yet to be explored fully.

This thin wooden blade is played with a bow and amplified through a contact mic or gramophone-like horn. Developed by Hans Reichel, each Daxophone has a slightly different shape, allowing for an infinite variety of tone qualities.

With several strings reaching across a room, the long string instrument developed by Ellen Fullman is like a guitar or harp that's big enough to walk through. The player can move their hands along the strings or shorten them with a slider, creating sounds like from another planet.

This instrument reads your brainwaves and converts them into sounds. Invented in the ‘40s, its functions now include converting thoughts into speech. More than anything else, this instrument could really change how we think about music and computers in the coming decades.

Invented by doctoral students at McGill, these are 3-D printed instruments thatplayers wear, creating music in response to players' movements. They're especially intended for dance performances that blur the line between art forms.