Take a gander at this facinating instrument. Cool, huh? The first time I saw it I was really impressed. The write up said it was made mostly from farm equipment, a la John Deere, and that a team spent thousands of hours perfecting it. The combination of music, machine, and art really grabbed me. Plus I loved that all the balls had a place to go after they were done and didn’t just fall all over the floor!
Then I dug a bit deeper. I noticed that some people thought this beautiful machine was a fake. I found myself not liking those people. Fools, I thought. This is genius! How dare you try to bring it down! Then I looked and listened more closely, both to the video itself and to the comments. Hmmm, some of those balls actually disappear in mid air and the sound of the melody doesn’t always correspond to the length of the xylophone-like bars. My research led me to the real creators of this piece, Wayne Lytle and David Crognale of Animusic.
Yes, it is an animation and not a physical machine. But that doesn’t mean it’s a fake. The faker is the person or persons who for some reason decided to add a bunch of hooey to it. Hooeey producers have been around for a long time. We should be used to them by now, I guess.
This vid is still and always will be in my list of favorites. Because to me real means more than something existing in time and space. There are so many things that are real that I cannot touch, see, taste, smell or hear. Much of my experience of life exists now only as memory, but it is real to me. The way my first puppy looked at me, the smell of my dad’s pipe, the shimmery blue sparkles on fresh fallen snow.
The idea that only physical things are real can leave us feeling lost and alone or even ripped off in life, if we let it. Especially when those things we like and people we love move on, move away or pass from this life. It always helps me to remember that many things in this world started out as unreal, as ideas in someone’s mind.
I had an idea once to create a quilt to commemorate some co-workers who had died. That idea was shared with a few other people and they added their notions to it. We gathered raw materials together and before long a real quilt existed in the world. An object that could be seen and touched, but that would never have existed without the original idea.
How many more things can you name that began as thoughts? Houses, cars, books, countries? And what about the earth, the solar system, the universe and we ourselves? Did we exist first as thoughts in the universal creative mind? And if we did is there someone out there on the sideline yelling “Fake, it’s all fake! It was all made out of nothing!”
Funny, don’t you think? I sort of like thinking I was made from nothing, just as much as I like this fantastic music machine. That way I can be as real as I want without too much bother or fuss.
Read On!
Amanda Lorenzo
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