Ugulele, an ukulele-sized electric organ

December 2002

Personal project to accompany me during long airplane flights

Ugulele is a very personal electric instrument that I designed and built for myself so that I can play music on long airplane rides without disturbing the neighboring passengers. The main components include six 555 timers as sound generators each of which has a string and thirteen variable resistors in series, equipped with copper frets as contact electrodes, which are tuned to the right resistance to produce the desired pitch. Once I played the Ugulele on a flight from San Francisco to Tokyo. It seemed that nobody was distracted by the sound or its size but it drew the attention of many curious passengers.