This is off topic but cool – the latest episode of Sound Builders takes a look at Steve Mann, the inventor of the hydraulophone – and the hot tub music machine.

Here’s a musical demo of the hot tub hydraulophone in action:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ov1Qgl_7I5g

via MotherboardTV:

In Episode 4 of Sound Builders, we travel to Toronto, Ontario to visit the amazing Steve Mann. While at MIT, where he earned a PhD in Media Arts & Sciences, Steve founded the Wearable Computers Group at the Media Lab, and built musical instruments using brainwaves and compressed hydraulic fluids. Lauded by some as the worlds first cyborg, and the initiator of the mobile blogging movement, Steve is now a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto.

For this episode, Steve volunteered to be both guest and host, using his human/cyborg first-person perspective to show us his studio, talk about his past inventions, and ask members of the circus to play the latest of his inventions: the hydraulophone, a highly tactile and mellifluous water-based instrument that Steve hopes can offer the blind and deaf a new method of music-creation.

To submit your own instrument idea, and win $1000, visit www.motherboard.tv/contest.

And see more Sound Builders at
www.motherboard.tv