Wind Harp Live!

Its not too difficult to add live audio to your own web page. You will need to get Windows Media Encoder, a free program found here. To broadcast the sound on the internet, I connected the harp to the microphone input of my PC and run Windows Media Encoder. A good tutorial on setting up live broadcasting can be found here. For the listener to hear the harp, I made a web page to launch Windows Media Player using the HTML code example found at this webpage . If it is windy and I actually have Windows Media Encoder running, you should be able to connect by going to My Wind Harp page.
You can learn more about my wind harp project by viewing some of my earlier blogs about the subject.

Wind Harp Experiments

After reading a lot about wind harps and hearing the awesome sounds they make, I decided to give it a try. I strung a steel wire between two "C" clamps separated by almost eight feet. The support is a 2" by 2" by 8 feet long pine stud I got from Home Depot. Each C clamp has a hole drilled on the side with a eye bolt installed to support the wire. The eyebolt is tensioned untill a nice tone is heard when plucked.

Photo on the left show pickup placed near the wire.

Photo on the right show the whole thing, about 8 feet high.

So I don't have to use a sounding board to make the sounds audible, I used a magnetic pick up and a Radio Shack amplifier to amplify the delicate vibrations. As the wind "plucks" the string, musical notes and harmonic vibrations could be heard.

A 3 inch C clamp holds the wire on each end.

You can hear what my wind harp sounds like at this link.

The Harp I made just uses one string to prove it works. Now imagine using several strings.

Wind Harps

I found an interesting wind harp design at this website . Wind Harps or more correctly called an Aeolian Harp is played by the wind. The wind causes the string to vibrate and if several strings are tuned to the same pitch, these sounds reinforce and modulate between themselves. The resulting sounds create a serene and peaceful melody. Such an instrument can be made with PVC pipe and nylon fishing line. The above website has a list of materials and full instructions on how to make one.