It's Summer here in the correct hemisphere, :) and the all-night-long giant cicadas have started their drumming and trilling and rasping and beating and thumping.

It's been a while since a new percussion instrument has been added to symphony orchestras, so may I suggest the development of a new one - a very large (say, about four times as large as a Kettle Drum) replica of the hollow abdomen of a giant cicada.

The percussive method could vary, as per the natural inspirations for the instruments. Some would be played by simply banging big logs of chitin against the abdomen, some would be played by rasping a spiny stick back and forth across striated chitonous thickenings in the artificial abdomen.

In all cases, once the instrument begins to play, it goes on all night, drowning out all other parts of the orchestra. It can only be stopped by shining a very bright light onto the player - the conductor has a portable spotlight attached to a battery for just this purpose.
-- ConsulFlaminicus, Dec 29 2006

I thought this was going to be a new alcoholic drink, like the tequila with a worm in it.

<nostalgic rambling> The hill behind my apartment in China was cicada party central, the noise so consistently and continuously present that it actually became easy to filter it out. There was also one month when the whole city became full of dragonflies, flying around in every direction, the air filled with their iridescent shimmers and translucent wings. </nr> +
-- imaginality, Dec 29 2006


Nutcase! +
-- DrCurry, Dec 29 2006



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