02 April 2011

"Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" - played by a wooden ball


It's an advertisement for a cellphone - but what an ad!
A wooden ball is set atop a long, wooden structure that might be a xylophone or a marimba, constructed in the middle of the woods. As the ball rolls downward, dropping onto each wooden “key,” it plays a note, and suddenly we are hearing Bach’s Cantata 147, “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” .. “We did not add any artificial music at all,” Harano wrote (though they did adjust some levels to “bring out the sound of river and nature”).
Found at the New York Times, via Switched, Engadget, and Neatorama.

11 comments:

  1. Wow. I'd buy that phone.

    The wooden ball doesn't keep very good time, though. :-D

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  2. Very impressive and very beautiful. Thanks for sharing it.

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  3. Wow, beautiful music with beautiful scenery.

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  4. That was super. I can't imagine how much time it took to make each piece of the whole and then assemble the "instrument". I hope they kept it so that it could perhaps be set up in a park and "played" on occasion.

    Thanks for sharing.

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  5. Truly amazing. Thanks for sharing this, Stan - it made my daughter's music teacher's day!

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  6. That was awesome. And then, at the end, they said "touch wood". The junior high-schooler in me snickered a little bit.

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  7. 迚も面白かった!Greatly enjoyed it =)

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  8. This totally reminds me of the great Japanese children's program Pitagora Suicchi (Pythagoras Switch, or ピタゴラスイッチ). They put together fantastic Rube Goldberg devices using household objects. Good clips are hard to find, but here's a fairly decent one (my apologies about the poor resolution).

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