Today, Gizmodo blogged a YouTube video of a woman playing Ode to Joy on a panpipe made from tampon applicators.  It’s an amazing idea whose time I am surprised hasn’t yet come (apologies if it has; I am as of yet totally ignorant of it).  As good as the video they posted was, the better one I think is the version of “Twinkle, Twinkle,” which I provide here for your edification:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdB0XAYDViw]

I don’t know…I think it’s got a bit more flair, but you be the judge. Anyway, maybe it not an ethnomusicological “best case scenario,” but definitely a diversionary project for the “creative organology” buffs out there.  (Get it!  “Creative orga”…because of where…musical instrument…nothing?  Nothing at all?  Yikes!)

In theory, Tamponcrafts’s videos make me think this is something Tan Dun might have come up with at one point, but what it really makes me think of are my days as an undergrad when I spent all my time hanging around with my future wife and her friends in Plimpton Hall at Barnard. I basically lived in that dorm for two years – it was a great place.  Anyway, there was this friend of our who who lived there too – her initials are “EB” – who I think would dig this video.  Not only that, but I think that were she were more musically inclined she would have made sets of pipes for all her friends and posted videos of them playing lite chamber pieces arranged for tampon pipes on the steps of Low Library on YouTube.  It would have been the best.  Hey “E,” welcome back to the City!

(By the way, if you liked the panpies, don’t miss the “blow gun” – not to be missed, people!)

dtn