Name: Making Music With Unlikely Instruments
Uploaded: 2025-07-21T17:14:05.000Z
Duration: 9 min 27 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Basic passive voice

This Great Big Story is made possible by Lexus.

Adverbs of degree

To play the instrument that is utilizing our gentle earth, it's like you're becoming one with the instrument in a very true way.

We're looking at the Great Stalag Pipe Organ of the Luray Caverns in Luray, Virginia.

When I press a key, it sends an electrical pulse up to a rubber-tipped mallet, which strikes the stalactite, causing it to vibrate and producing an incredibly beautiful musical tone.

The area that the strikers cover is roughly three and a half acres, which then makes it literally the world's largest musical instrument.

It is a very gentle sound, very peaceful.

There's only one like it in the world, and it's something incredibly different and wonderfully beautiful.

There's the rulers, the reverb tank, the Ebo.

A normal instrument, you're playing it and you're expecting it to have a sound that is pleasing, but with an instrument like this, the goal is to just produce sounds that, in this case, are disturbing.

The apprehension engine, it's an instrument that creates a variety of really creepy and, some would say, horrifying sounds.

My name is Mark Fulmer, and I'm the director of the Luray Caverns in Luray, Virginia.

I'm Corvin, I'm a film music composer, and lately I've been focusing on horror movie scores.

Two of my biggest hits, as far as horror films are concerned, was from the late 90s, a film called Cube, and most recently, The Witch.

I originally commissioned the apprehension engine because I was tired of the same digital samples, which resulted in a lot of sameness of a lot of horror music.

So I was looking for something more experimental, more acoustic, that would give me a little bit more of an original sound.

That's where I contacted my friend, Tony Duggan-Smith.

So Mark called me asking me to create a crazy instrument for horror films, because I'd never done anything like that before.

It made me empty out all my pockets and all my drawers of any knick-knacks and bits and bobs I could possibly string together to make it happen for him.

You're dealing with things that stir primal emotions and feelings.

And there actually is a skill set that you have to acquire in order to get the most out of it.

It expresses what really can't be expressed any other way.

It's not music in the traditional sense at all, but let me put it this way, the apprehension engine definitely evokes an emotion.

So I would call it music. w hyung sik Very often people think it's going to be funny, and then they realized it's not really, we really do music.

It's not impossible to make music with vegetables.

My name is Susanna Gartmeyer, and I'm a member of the Vegetable Orchestra.

The first instrument was the tomato, because you can do sound with tomatoes, but it will be messy for sure.

You can just buy it at the market and play it.

And then there are the simple instruments, like with one cut or some cuts, you get it like that.

Then with the more complex instruments, we have some that work like normal instruments, you know.

The pumpkin is the bass drum, and the sound of the pumpkin is really important.

After shopping, we go to the venue and start to build instruments.

All in all, it takes two to three hours to build all the instruments for everybody.

And since we have new instruments each time, we have to have a very long soundcheck.

Applause We have a lot of different musical influences in the orchestra.

Since we are really many people, everybody is interested in different things.

We make a soup during the building process of the vegetable instruments, with the remaining vegetables.

And we serve it to the audience after the concert.

And it's also after hearing and seeing us and smelling the vegetables, which will be intense in there, because it's so small, this theatre, and then you can also eat it.

You never get it out of your head anymore if you're in the orchestra, to look at vegetables in another way.

Applause Music I'm the first woman to graduate with a doctorate from Juilliard, and now I play the toy piano.

I have transformed the toy piano into a real instrument.

To play the toy piano well, you have to practice on it every bit as hard as you would on a normal piano.

In fact, I think you have to work even harder, because the action is so primitive.

You can make it sound beautiful, you can make it sound convincing.

It's a bit like going down the rabbit hole and taking your audience with you, way back down this avenue to your childhood days.

Music Once a sceptical person comes to a toy piano concert that I give, I'm able to turn them around.

It's a whole extended family now of people into toy pianos.

It's a fearless little band who are willing to stick their necks out for toys.