The group Six Hand Movements, playing homemade musical instruments. Amy Everard plays the chimes with her group, The Mechanics (bottom left), and Will Yokel poses with his elaborate wind instrument (bottom right). Photography © Andrew Higley/University of Cincinnati

Goethe famously described architecture as "frozen music." A less canonized poet, Elvis Costello, said that writing about music is like "dancing about architecture." But aside from esoteric bons mots, the arts of architecture and music appear to have little in common.

So leave it to a university to finally figure out the relationship.

About 120 first-year University of Cincinnati architecture and interior design students worked in groups to design, build, and play musical instruments constructed from discarded appliances and a few parts picked up at local hardware stores. The students then had to perform original compositions on their instruments. The concert, on January 22, played to a packed house.

Marc Swackhamer, an assistant professor of architecture, helped to organize the project, along with the rest of the first-year studio professors.

"The idea here is that students should stretch themselves beyond what they're accustomed to or comfortable with," Swackhamer said.

Susan Strike, a first-year architecture student, built a slide guitar, using a discarded refrigerator shelf as a base. The strings of the guitar, however, were purchased.

"We could spend money on our project, as long as most of it was built from trash," Strike said.

The appliance parts used for these instruments came from an earlier first-year studio project, the disassembly of appliances. The students used the parts as models for drawing practice, but their reuse as instruments also taught a lesson in resourcefulness.

"Our whole first-year program is about creativity and using resources," Strike said.

The students built the instruments on their own, but they were grouped together into bands for the performance.

"We didn't know who we would be playing with when we designed our instruments," Strike said, "so we couldn't pick a group of instruments that would go together. We had to make it work."

The range of instruments made for an eclectic mix onstage: PVC-pipe saxophones, harps made from ovens, zithers, whistles, and an array of percussion instruments.

The instruments didn't always sound like their builders planned them to. Justin Smith, a student, said that his copper-pipe wind instrument "makes a sound more like a choo-choo train than music."

Despite the unexpected, the concert went off well, and the students have moved on to building something more overtly architectural: staircases. But the lessons learned from the pairing of the seemingly unrelated disciplines of architecture and music will stick with them, or at least their professor hopes so.

"We can learn a lot about design issues from everyday life, everyday objects," Swackhamer said. "We can learn the principles of design from cuisine, art, a movie, a magazine, a building, and yes, from old appliances."

By Kevin Lerner