The Tubulator

The Tubulator is a custom-built PVC pipe instrument I designed and constructed over a summer holiday, partly inspired by the Blue Man Group. This rare instrument features 32 notes ranging from A1 to E4, using 67 mm diameter PVC drain pipes with 90° bends, arranged and color-coded like a piano keyboard for convenience. Pipe lengths span from around 51 cm for E4 to just over 3 meters for A1, calculated using the acoustic resonance formula for open-ended pipes:

where L is pipe length, v is the speed of sound in air (~343 m/s at room temperature), f is the desired frequency, and d is the pipe diameter (67 mm in this case). The project was not only a fun musical endeavour but also a great physics experiment, exploring the relationship between pipe length, pitch, resonance, and design optimisation. A fun fact: tuning can shift by up to 30 cents between indoor and outdoor temperatures!