Get smart curated videos delivered to your inbox.   SUBSCRIBE
The Kid Should See This

How to make a clay ocarina

Watch more with these video collections:

The San Jose Museum of Art demonstrates how to make an ocarina, a vessel flute, out of clay. Water and a few sculpting tools—a wood chopstick, carved popsicle sticks, or fork handles—will help you complete the project.

Ocarinas are not only a mythic instrument discovered by a Hylian warrior in a dream shrine; these wind instruments belong to “a very old family of instruments, believed to date back over 12,000 years.”

ocarina
Similar flute vessels existed throughout history in China, Korea, and Japan, across Mesoamerica, and eventually in Europe. From Wikipedia:

“The modern European ocarina dates back to the 19th century, when Giuseppe Donati from Budrio, a town near Bologna, Italy, transformed the ocarina from a toy, which played only a few notes, into a more comprehensive instrument (known as the first ‘classical’ ocarina). The word ocarina derives from ucaréṅna, which in the Bolognese dialect means ‘little goose.'”

San Jose’s ocarina is made by hollowing out a clay sphere. The beveled hole is made on the top along with the holes.

the beveled section
In the video below, high school ceramics teacher Keith Moses demonstrates how to make a clay ocarina in real-time with helpful narration.

“Start to finish, if you didn’t blow dry, you can definitely do this as a class project, and about twenty minutes with blow drying. These are almost five-minute ocarinas… very fun and easy to make.”

His instrument design begins with a pinch pot sealed with a flat bottom. The beveled hole is carved out of the bottom. He also decorates his ocarinas with patterns or as animals.

teacher Keith Moses

Watch these videos next:
• Can you carve an ocarina from a butternut squash?
Three performances with A Música Portuguesa A Gostar Dela Própria
• The Lick, a seven-note musical phrase played on 91 instruments

Bonus: Peruvian water whistles make animal sounds.

This Webby award-winning video collection exists to help teachers, librarians, and families spark kid wonder and curiosity. TKSST features smarter, more meaningful content than what's usually served up by YouTube's algorithms, and amplifies the creators who make that content.

Curated, kid-friendly, independently-published. Support this mission by becoming a sustaining member today.

🌈 Watch these videos next...

Where India’s Top Brass Get Their Instruments

Rion Nakaya

Vive le Vent (Jingle Bells) played on homemade instruments

Rion Nakaya

Two professors sculpt each other in less than ten minutes

Rion Nakaya

Tiger Rag on a homemade Emphatic Chromatic Callioforte

Rion Nakaya

Throwing a simple pottery salt pot on the wheel

Rion Nakaya

Three performances with A Música Portuguesa A Gostar Dela Própria

Rion Nakaya

The Wintergatan Marble Machine, music made from 2,000 marbles

Rion Nakaya

The Viola Maker: How Helen Michetschläger crafts string instruments

Rion Nakaya

The Sound of Wood: From sapling to violin

Rion Nakaya