By
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Illustration by
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November 18, 2025
What comes to mind when you read the term “musical instrument”? Probably some images that include a piano, a guitar, a drum set, maybe a violin or flute or trumpet. And those are all musical instruments, designed and built to be used by human hands and mouths and lungs to make music.
So then, a musical instrument is something with which you make music. Working outward from that definition means a musical instrument can be…anything. Can you make music with it? Then it’s an instrument. This goes beyond quirky, novelty instruments like the daxophone or Jew’s harp, to include the repurposing of ubiquitous objects for musical purposes: the wooden boxes and plastic buckets favored by busking percussionists, the homemade instruments in a jug band, Henry Fillmore’s Klaxophone and Henry Threagill’s Hubkaphone.
One of the features of avant-garde and experimental music through the centuries has been musicians working with completely unexpected instruments, and making fantastic and creative things with them. With free experimentation at the core of Bandcamp’s enormous pool of artists, here are some examples that will surprise and amaze you.
Benda
Benda plays John Cage – Living Room Music
It’s natural that John Cage appears on this list, but the choice is a modest and wonderful work that is a true deep cut. Cage composed Living Room Music in 1940 for four musicians who play unspecified objects or architectural features that can be found in a living room: books, the floor, window frames, anything that can play a melody. Striking an object, i.e. playing a rhythm on it, is the quickest way to turn it into an instrument, and percussion is central, but so is the group recitation of Gertrude Stein’s poem The World is Round.
Zimoun
Various Vibrating Materials
Swiss multimedia artist Zimoun sits in a liminal space between common instruments and using non-instrument objects as the sources for sonic material he crafts into musical ideas. For gallery installations, he builds mechanical objects out of prosaic materials that produce sound, like cardboard and wire; he treats instruments like electric guitars the same way: As objects that make sounds. This project is at the extreme foundation of his concepts, using what he describes as “microscopic audio recordings of small materials set under vibration to generate sounds,” that become compositional materials.
Jean-Baptiste Geoffroy
Intertidal Dripping Music
There can be a fine line between making a recording of sounds from unusual instrumentation and field recordings. Is a sound map or soundwalk an example of different ideas about instruments, or is it a documentary? For this list, the dividing line is intention and experimentation: Is this artist trying to make music with an ordinary thing used in an extraordinary way? The answer from this album is “yes,” with Jean-Baptiste Geoffroy setting hydrophones between seawater ponds and recording the sounds as water drips from one to another at regular intervals, a literal tidal dance music.
MuMu
Five Pieces for Stones
After the human body and voice, the first musical instruments were sticks and stones, each to beat with or against each other in time. The ultimate roots music.
Sonic Youth
Goodbye 20th Century
The great, universe-shifting breakthroughs in musical instrument technology over the last 100 years have been the invention of the microphone, magnetic tape, and the digital CPU. With the first two, sounds could be amplified and recorded. The results have been obvious, changing ideas about how instruments could be played, from making vibrato more common for string players to turning the body and voice into the beatbox. Steve Reich showed how the microphone itself could be an instrument in his combination phase composition/conceptual art piece “Pendulum Music,” performed through the years with people like sculptor Robert Serra. In it, four suspended microphones are let go to sweep like pendulums in front of speakers, producing feedback and changing as entropy sets in. Here’s a “cover” from Sonic Youth.
Alvin Lucier
I am sitting in a room. Archival Recordings 1969-2019
Alvin Lucier‘s I am sitting in a room is many things, perhaps an infinite number. Sonically, it is an architectural feature in a room in any house or building, turned into a musical instrument through the vibrations of the human voice. Along with being a conceptual masterpiece and an extraordinary demonstration of the physical properties of acoustics, it’s a descendant of Cage’s Living Room Music born of microphones and tape.
Karlheinz Essl
No-Input Mixer Studies
The mixing board is another ubiquitous piece of contemporary recording technology. Signals from instruments go through the board, where they are massaged with tools for volume (sliders), tone quality (EQ), and effects like delay and reverb, then sent out to speakers or an audio recorder. But if you take that output and plug it back into the input, you have a feedback loop in each channel, which you can “play” with the same sliders and knobs. The mixer becomes its own musical instrument, and artists can make it sing.
Backtrace
Soundfonts Ruined Computer Music
Making music with a laptop is so common these days that it’s easy to overlook that the computer itself is not inherently a musical instrument—it has to be made into one via software. This is crucially different from software synthesizers that emulate musical instruments, or digital audio workstations loading representations of recording studios onto a computer. Computer music languages like the open-source Csound and SuperCollider are tools for composers to write instructions for the computer to produce sounds and order them in time. The title here is a cheeky reference to a file format for playing MIDI files, but the dazzling sounds within were all created and ordered using SuperCollider. (You can buy and play the album, and you can also download and install SuperCollider and then use the source code to “play” the music yourself.)
The User
Symphony #1 for Dot Matrix Printers
Another thing that computers do when they execute software commands is pass along information and instructions to other objects, like printers or fax machines. And often those other objects make sounds, which a curious and imaginative musician like The User can use to organize into an intentional piece of music, including symphonies for dot matrix printers.
Yasunao Tone
MP3 Deviations #6+7
A recording is not music, it’s a media object that contains music, and is meant to be reproduced on the appropriate player. Musicians have been playing around with this relationship since the recorded era began, using LPs as part of pieces and performances, from Cage’s 1939 Imaginary Landscape 1 to the work of turntablist and composer Marina Rosenfeld; elsewhere, artists like Nic Collins have explored what happens when you scratch up a CD. Fluxus artist Yasunao Tone also started working with altering CDs and making pieces for CD players, and then started to bore down to digital roots by altering, adjusting, corrupting, and disassembling MP3 files in live performance settings. This album is two tracks of Tone performing live in New York City in June and July 2011, taking digital objects and prying apart the differences between “compression encoder and decoder,” using error messages to determine audio and playback parameters, altering timbre and pitch, all producing, as he says in the notes, “unpredictable and unknowable sound.”
Iordache
Organic Natural
The basic technique of playing a reed instrument—making a reed vibrate with lung power and embouchure focus—is portable. Kids have known for generations that you can make a blade of grass vibrate with pitches by squeezing it between your hands and buzzing it with your mouth. Romanian artist Iordache, a saxophonist, has made a whole album improvising with grasses and a mind-boggling variety of other things including dandelions, cigar tubes, leaves, wild oats, and pine cones. He admits “a little reverb was added.” We’ll let him have it.
Alan Lamb
Night Passage
Australian artist Alan Lamb shared with Zimoun the idea of taking plain objects and making them vibrate. Perhaps there is an underlying influence of geography that distinguishes the two: Zimoun working in the cozy space of Switzerland, surrounded by the Alps, Lamb looking into the vast, empty interior of Australia. Many of Lamb’s pieces involved tapping into long wires, like telegraph wires, strung through this emptiness, and listening to and recording their vibrations as air and earth shifted, like the ancient string tunings of Mesopotamia, opened up by the planet. As Lawrence English notes for this reissue, Lamb uncovered, “right before us…a sound world locked within materials we pass by everyday.”
Ross Bolleter
Total Piano
With a little conceptual leeway, we can actually include a piano in this list, as long as it’s a piano that almost no one would ever want to play. Ross Bolleter invented the idea of the “Ruined Piano,” though a better way to put it is that he found abandoned pianos and left them outside to see how they would decay. He classifies the results into categories like “dilapidated,” “disaggregated,” “decomposed,” and “annihilated,” then he plays them as if they were ordinary. What comes out is a mass of incredible, uncanny, and truly irreproducible sounds that have nothing to do with the purpose of the original piano. An instrument becomes an object and then again an instrument, because that’s just something you make music with.
