Winner of the Bike Shorts Film Competition, Bicycle Sounds was created by Stephen Meierding, an artist, photographer, and videographer in NYC. It’s a great exploration of rhythm, sound, color and physics. The kid should see this!

via Devour.

More bicycles (and chains!) from our archives.

After watching How to Make a Steel Drum from a barrel (and how to tune it!), it’s great to see exactly where these notes live on this 22” surface. How do steel drum players know where the right notes will be? Turns out that they’ve got this little map memorized!

Making a Flamenco Guitar. We love videos about music and making instruments and this vid by Deep Green Sea is another beautiful piece to add to our list. Mixing art with measurement and sound, they not only show the detail of the craft, but they overlay wonderful descriptive text and geometric elements in the shots, too. 

The Art of Making series condensed 299 hours of blood, sweat, and tears into a three-minute film, highlighting the craftsmanship behind guitar maker Vassilis Lazarides’ handmade Flamenco guitars.

via Devour.

More instruments being made: Cymbals, a Steel Drum, and a Violin.

Giant piano! And on this particular giant piano (with rainbow light up keys!), a happy gentleman at NYC’s F.A.O. Schwartz plays the Mario theme song… and not perfectly, which is the best part! — It’s the only way you can tell how much practice and work it must take to tap out such an epic song on such a giant instrument.

h/t @mindfulmimi.

When the elephant keepers at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo hear the sound of a harmonica, it’s not the radio they’ve left on. Instead, it’s the Zoo’s 36-year-old Asian elephant, Shanthi, who, unsolicited, has a propensity for coming up with her own ditties using whatever instruments the keepers have provided. These include harmonicas, horns and other noisemakers. The Zoo has captured some of Shanthi’s most recent capriccios on this video…

Shanthi is the mother of the Zoo’s 10-year-old calf, Kandula. Asian elephants are endangered in the wild, where 30,000 to 50,000 Asian elephants still live in the forests of south and southeast Asia.

via Viral Viral Videos.