The Mystery of the MIM

Yesterday we went to the new Musical Instrument Museum (MIM for short) with our homeschool group. Before we went into the museum, while we were standing in the courtyard, we learned from the tour guide that the entire building was made from sandstone shipped from India. She also told us that it took six years to collect all the instruments that are in the museum. I found it very interesting how they used different classes of instruments to organize our presentation, how each part of the world has all different types of instruments, and how they acquired the biggest stringed instrument in the world for this museum.

For the first part of the tour, there was a small demonstration on the different categories of musical instruments. These categories are: Aerophones, Membranophones, Electrophones, Idiophones, Corpophones, and Chordophones. The museum classifies these instruments in these categories to better understand how they are played. The best Example of these classes is the Theremin. It Makes sound by sending an electronic signal to an ampliffier when it's magnetic fields are disturbed. So, the Theremin is an electrophone.

Another thing that made the museum interesting was all the different types of instruments they had. It seemed like there were at least two instruments from every country in the world. That's more than 390 instruments from around the world. Other wise know as enough instruments to give a musician a headache trying to remember them all. Along with these instruments they also had some historic ones on display including one of the light up drums from the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the Peace Piano, Eric Clapton's guitar "Brownie", and a couple of amplifiers that Dick Dale blew up. Who knew a broken amp could be considered historic.

My favorite instrument in the museum is the Octobass. It is a 12 foot tall three stringed Double bass that is so deep that it can barely be heard by human ears. Only three were ever made, and there is only one person in the western hemisphere who can play one. After we got home, Omar Domkus (the parent who set up the tour and he is also a bass player) sent us a YouTube video of someone playing the same Octobass. It sounded like a dying whale.

Another thing I noticed about the tour was the fact that the tour guide seemed to think we didn't know much about instruments. During our second run through the museum, (the tour guide seemed to be rushing us through the exhibits) the tour guide met up with my dad and I while we were looking at the electric guitars. She told us about how on the web-site they had a whole curriculum on how electric guitars and amps work. My dad then explained how we had just finished building one (picture of the guitar we built is below), and he told her that I work the sound board at our church. The look on her face was priceless.

This concludes the mystery of the MIM: Idiophones don't mean the maker was an idiot, broken amps can be historic, and the tour was most likely made for public school groups.

An Ordinary School Day

One of the advantages to homeschooling is that there is no set time you need to finish it, but you can go at your own pace. We usually start math around 10-10:30, and end around noon. We then have lunch, and begin work on writing. We then end around 1:00 and move on to another activity like geography, science, or history. We do this selected subject until about 2:00 and then move on to practicing our instruments. While Rebecca's practicing piano, I'm practicing clarinet or guitar, and when I'm practicing piano, Rebecca's practicing flute. This lasts until about 3:00 when we consider our self done and then have free time for the rest of the day. Rebecca usually spends that time writing books and short stories, while I usually spend my time reading or playing on the computer.

Although this is what an ordinary day of homeschooling is like, we almost always have some sort of Shakespeare play or science center homeschool class at least once a month. Most of the science center classes revolved around physics, like the Cat-A-Pult class where you were literally flinging a rubber cat trying to hit a target using a makeshift catapult, but there was a chemistry class, a robotics class, and a scientific method class. Along with all these classes, at home, I also made an illustrated, wall sized, periodic table, and recently, I built a guitar fuzz distortion pedal with my dad. I would say that the science activities I'm doing at home now are much more fun and advanced than when I was in school. When I was in second grade, I made a science fair project for the school science fair on how icicles are made. I enjoyed this, but the only other student participant was a fifth-grader who had done a project on how if you run a magnet over sand, little black particles will appear. After about three minutes of walking around the "science fair" we left the display board there and came back for it later.