Thanks to a friendly Italian Wikipedia moderator, my relevance to the world increased by one hyperlink today after being mentioned in the Wikipedia “Whamola” article. The Italian contacted me (via e-mail in great English) asking permission to use photos, etc. from my aging webpage on building my own Whamola instrument which I posted 4 years ago. Inspired by the original wielded by Les Claypool, I built the instrument in my Dad’s basement workshop with his expert handyman guidance for a college multimedia class project.
The project was specifically about affordance, a term used in interface and interaction design. Although I deemed the instrument itself a failure, I believe I was successful in demonstrating the concept of affordance not just to myself but to my classmates as well.
The instrument itself worked well enough to play it through my bass rig (I have a recording of it) and I enjoyed many subsequent “jams” experimenting with the unusual range of sounds it was capable of reproducing. Of course, it was nowhere near production quality and would break the expensive upright bass strings I was purchasing for it. I know others with access to better tools and materials have done a much superior job in crafting the instrument.
I still get inquiries on how I built the instrument. I developed a form letter to respond with stating that I did not document anything but you wouldn’t want to follow my process even if I did.
Well, that is not entirely true. I did write a paper for the project titled The Whamola Project: A Lesson on Affordances (PDF) which I am now offering to anyone who wants more background and information on how I created the Whamola. Hopefully, those interested can learn from my experience and make a much more successful instrument than I was ever capable of. If you do, please keep me posted on your progress.
I was just listening to Les Claypool - Whamola