Lituus Play
A graduate student (Who seems to actually accomplish things. Bastard.) recently helped to re-introduce an extinct, and ridiculously unwieldy instrument back into the wild. The impractical device in question is called the Lituus, and it’s a basically a really long horn. Over 8ft long, in fact (that’s two-and-a-half-ish meters, metric folk). Can you imagine trying to pack that baby up at the end of a concert? Yeah. That’s probably why no-one has been using it for the last 300 years.
Despite not having a drawing of what the thing looked like, or even a proper ye olde description of it, the researchers used vague hints about it’s shape and tonal range to come up with a design using witchcraft and/or simulation software. And it works. They even played BWV 118 with two of the little beasts this year. No YouTube video yet. There is a short clip of it over on the BBC website, though.
I’m curious about the software they used to design this thing. I wonder if instead of optimizing it to be a simple straight line, they can make it really, really complicated instead. Like with TONNES of twisting and spiraling and turns and crap. Maybe you could fold it into a sphere, or a cube. You could have a whole set of platonic solid shaped horns.
Reason number 5,183 why I want a metal-working shop in my garage.