Artists and sculptors have been turning bicycle parts into objets d'art since, well, bicycles have been around. Perhaps the most famous examples are the "bull's head" Pablo Picasso fashioned from handlebars and a saddle, and Marcel Duchamp's bicycle wheel.
In those, and other works, the parts are ingredients used, like paint or clay, to create forms or evoke images. Rarely are bike parts used as the means--think the paintbrush, pen or musical instrument-- rather than the materials or medium, for making a work.
Nicolas Bras is a Paris-based musician and tinkerer who evokes his sounds from homemade instruments. You can see and hear some of them on his "Musiques de Nulle Part" (Music from Nowhere) series on YouTube. Among them is this "flute" made from a bicycle wheel.
The "music" is made by blowing through a tube onto the randomly-tuned pan flutes attached to the bicycle wheel. I put quotes around "music" because not everyone would so categorize the sound coming from it. Bras, however, says he is working on more melodious and complex sounds from his rotary flute. I don't doubt he's capable of such a thing: After all, we don't know what came out when Pan, the Greek god of nature (for whom the flute is named), supposedly exhaled into it for the first time.
Ancient Greek images depict shepherds playing it. Perhaps in the future, we will follow the tunes Nicolas Bras spins on his bicycle wheel flute.
