mcgrew's Journal: The wildest musical instrument I've ever seen

Someone emailed a wmv of this, but it's here on youtube. The thing is made of farm machinery and looks to be a hell of an engineering feat, but it's more art than engineering.

It was built as a collaborative effort between the Robert M. Trammell Music Conservatory and the Sharon Wick School of Engineering at the University of Iowa. 97% of the machine's components came from John Deere Industries and Irrigation Equipment of Bancroft, Iowa. It took the team a combined 13,029 hours (6.26 years) of set-up, alignment, calibration, and tuning. It is now on display in the Matthew Gerhard Alumni Hall at the University and is slated to be donated to the Smithsonian.

It impressed the hell out of me.

Real or CGI?

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

It made my day. Thanks!

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[Qzukk]

Pretty sure its part of the animusic series [animusic.com], in fact it looks like this one's on the cover of the disc they're selling there.

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[FatAlb3rt]

The only engineering here is computer engineering [snopes.com].

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[mcgrew]

You can go to Iowa to see for yourself, I guess. However, it would be damned hard to build that thing without using computers.