Creative Work

Lap Steel Guitar

Noah Milholland

Recycled and repurposed wood, and mounting hardware.

Fashioned from a cut of West African Mahogany reclaimed from a local dumpster, this piece is made up of almost entirely repurposed materials. Aside from strings, a pickup, and tuners, every other piece of hardware was recovered from something that would otherwise go to waste. A license plate cut into a pickguard with electronic components pulled from an analog tuner allows the instrument to function with an amplifier and be played in conjunction with various analog effects. The nut, bridge, and saddle are all fashioned out of old brackets and scrap aluminum, durable hardware that functions just like a real instrument.

Dumpster Bass

Noah Milholland

Reclaimed wood and scrap hardware

A more direct approach of showing how trash can be made into music, this piece is made up of an old fencepost, damaged and worn from whatever previous life it had. With electronics all pulled from damaged radios, the principles of physics are put into practice to turn plucked strings into electronic signals with a simple fridge magnet and coil of wire. The strings and remaining hardware scavenged from damaged instruments, old license plates, and scrap metal breathe new life into what would otherwise be trash.

Effect Modulation Pedals

Noah Milholland

Reclaimed electronics

These devices, made from components harvested from broken electronics soon to be sent to a landfill, allow for the analog modulation of a guitar's tone, gain, echo, and more. Exemplifying how art and science can blend together to create something new, these musical accompaniments highlight just how the most basic collection of junk resistors, capacitors, and transistors can be repurposed into seemingly infinite things.