Vegetables aren't just food. They can also be transformed
into musical instruments. That's the case for Chinese brothers Nan
Weidong and Nan Weiping, who play anything from classical music to
pop songs on instruments made entirely from vegetables.
Watch Video;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7qiwu46hrA
People could be forgiven for
thinking Nan Weidong and Nan Weiping run a restaurant. But the bags
stuffed with vegetables that the brothers lug back home are used
for a very different purpose -- to make musical instruments. They
grew up surrounded by vegetables on a farm, and now live in a
narrow apartment in Beijing. They started learning conventional
instruments from a young age, but only came up with the idea of
playing music with vegetables two years ago. An important part of
their work is to select the right vegetables.
Nan Weidong, big brother, said,
"If the water content in vegetables evaporates, the tune will
become higher than the basic tune or go out of tune. Therefore, the
vegetables have to be solid and hard. We can't use vegetables left
over from other days."
The brothers play anything from
traditional Chinese flute music to modern pop. Different vegetables
have different scales and are therefore suited to different
melodies. No vegetable goes untested: a sweet potato becomes an
ocarina, a bamboo shoot becomes a flute.
Nan Weiping, younger brother,
said, "The deeper the hole, the lower the pitch. The shallower the
hole, the high the pitch. The size of the hole also matters to
guarantee the quality of the sound."
The Nan brothers have appeared on
many talent shows in China and often receive payments of up to
8,000 US dollars for one performance. They manage to make a living
from the shows, although they are few and far between, and each one
requires the brothers to make a fresh new set of instruments. But
unfazed, the Nan brothers say they will go on creating ever more
elaborate vegetable instruments to play an even wider range of
music.
<!--/enpcontent-->