Earth Tones Music Garden
Raven Hill Discovery Center’s Earth Tones Music Garden connects the science of sound and the history of instruments to the art of music. Visitors to Raven Hill Discovery Center can create musical sounds using instruments built like ones that our ancestors fashioned over many centuries, as well as more modern ones designed within the last 20 years. Earth Tones does not refer to colors, but rather to the deep and rich sounds that emerge as individuals, families and school groups use the earth as sounding boards and resonating chambers and earth materials to generate beautiful melodies with wood, metal and stone instruments. The Earth Tones musical instruments include a 75’ friction harp, stone lithophone, African Amadinda, whale drum, slap tubes, mushroom bells, friction rods, brake drum metalophone and triangles, all which can be played separately or used in concert.
Clockwise from pathway:
• Lithophone made of granite countertop by Tom Kaufmann
• Bench donated by blacksmith George Magsig & Town & Country Homes
• Friction Rods made of aluminum rods by Tom Kaufmann
• Long String Instrument made of 75-foot aluminum wire hooked to piano harp by Tom
Kaufmann
• Brake drum metalophone
• Slap Tubes made of black ABS plastic pipe by Tom Kaufmann
• Mushroom Bells made of cut-off oxygen tanks by Tom Kaufmann
• Whale Drum made from cut-off propane tank with “tongues” by Elemental Design
• Triangles made by blacksmith George Magsig
Under gazebo:
• Xylophone made of pine two-by-fours by Tom Kaufmann
• Cymbal found in Albion in 1966 by Tim Leach
• Piano Harp that is sounding board for Long String Instrument
