The theremin is the most famous weird instrument and also the least weird one on this list. You wave your hands near two antennas and it makes eerie sci-fi sounds. Clara Rockmore played it at Carnegie Hall in the 1930s. At this point, the theremin is practically conventional.
These are stranger.
The Cristal Baschet
Invented by François and Bernard Baschet in the 1950s, the cristal baschet is a glass harmonica’s more unsettling cousin. The player runs wet fingers along glass rods of varying lengths, which cause metal vibrators to resonate. The sound is somewhere between a soprano singing through a fog machine and a ghost trying to file a complaint.
It sounds like the inside of a dream you cannot quite remember. Avant-garde composers loved it. Tom Waits used it on his 1983 album “Swordfishtrombones” to create sounds that no other instrument could produce. There are fewer than 200 in existence worldwide because building one takes serious craft, and the glass components require specific humidity conditions to play consistently. The Paris Conservatoire has one.
The Hydraulophone
The hydraulophone is exactly what it sounds like: a musical instrument that uses water. Holes in a pipe let water flow out, and when you cover them with your fingers, the pressure change causes vibrations in the water column, which produces sound through a resonating chamber. It is like a pipe organ, but wet, and louder than you would expect.
Jim Nienhuys, the primary inventor of the modern hydraulophone, installed one in the Ontario Science Centre in 2007. The instrument is also designed to be played by people with visual impairments, since you can locate the holes by feel rather than sight, and the water itself provides tactile feedback. There are versions designed for use in rivers and pools, because apparently someone decided the problem with outdoor concerts was insufficient moisture.
The Zeusaphone
The zeusaphone, also called a singing Tesla coil, uses a solid-state Tesla coil to play music through modulated electrical discharges. The lightning arcs are modulated at audio frequencies, which means the sparks themselves vibrate the air to create sound. You are literally hearing electricity.
It is extremely loud, moderately dangerous, and sounds like something between a synthesizer and a very angry wasp the size of a refrigerator. Arcs can reach several feet long. ArcAttack, a performance group based in Austin, Texas, has been performing with zeusaphones since the mid-2000s, including a version of the Doctor Who theme that became an early viral video. Their performers wear Faraday suits to avoid being grounded through their bodies during performances.
This is the musical genre where safety is a relevant concern. The same creative impulse that drives people to build unusual instruments also drives people to push technology to its limits, which is a pattern you see across creative fields. The AI art tools of 2026 and Tesla coil concerts in 2005 both come from the same place: someone asking “what if we did it this way instead?”
The Hurdy-Gurdy
The hurdy-gurdy is old, not obscure in historical terms, but almost nobody has heard one live in the modern era despite it experiencing a genuine revival in folk and dark folk music.
A hand crank turns a rosined wooden wheel that acts like a continuous bow against a set of strings. The player’s left hand controls melody keys while the right hand turns the crank. One or more drone strings play continuously, like a bagpipe drone. Some hurdy-gurdies also have a buzzing bridge that can be made to buzz rhythmically with subtle crank pressure variations, adding a percussive element.
The medieval sound is distinctive: something between a bagpipe and a violin with an additional buzzing quality that feels simultaneously ancient and oddly hypnotic. Heilung, the Danish-Norwegian-German experimental folk group, has brought the hurdy-gurdy to stadium-level audiences as part of their archaeological sound design approach. Their performances include it alongside frame drums, bone flutes, and instruments reconstructed from museum artifacts.
The Singing Saw
A regular carpenter’s handsaw, played with a violin bow while the player holds the blade in a J or S curve that produces a tone. The pitch changes as the curve changes. It sounds exactly like the most haunted instrument you can imagine, which is why it appears in virtually every horror and experimental soundtrack ever made.
David Lynch has used it repeatedly. Tom Waits again. The musical “Sweeney Todd” has it in the original orchestration. It is cheap, requires no special construction, and makes a sound that nothing else makes. Any saw can be played this way, though flexible carpenter saws with thinner blades work better than stiff rip saws.
This is the instrument that most directly demonstrates that music is fundamentally about vibration and that anything capable of vibrating in a controlled way is potentially an instrument. The same principle drives the entire tradition of found-sound composition, where composers build pieces from industrial noise, body percussion, or whatever happens to produce an interesting frequency when struck or bowed.
The Pikasso Guitar
Built by luthier Linda Manzer for jazz guitarist Pat Metheny in 1984, the Pikasso guitar has 42 strings, four necks, and a body inspired by cubist art. It takes roughly 70 hours to tune. Playing it requires rethinking what a guitar is at a fundamental level.
Metheny has said that learning to play it took years of adjustment. The instrument has a range wider than a piano over some octaves. Manzer built only one. It lives in a climate-controlled case and travels with a dedicated security team for performances.
There is exactly one person in the world who can genuinely play the Pikasso guitar, and that person is Pat Metheny. This is a category of instrument that exists not for practical use but to test the outer limits of what music can be when all conventional constraints are removed. The result is an object that is simultaneously a sculpture, a challenge, and a piece of sound art.
Why These Instruments Exist
Every instrument on this list exists because someone was not satisfied with what already existed. They wanted a sound that did not exist yet, so they built the machine that could make it.
Most of them did not enter mainstream use. But they changed what musicians who encountered them thought was possible, and that influence spread. The cristal baschet’s tones informed a generation of electronic music producers looking for organic unpredictability. The singing saw’s eerie pitch influenced horror sound design for decades. The hurdy-gurdy’s revival helped define a whole genre of medieval and dark folk music with audiences in the millions.
The vinyl revival is partly about objects that have physical character. These instruments are the extreme version of that: they do not just have character, they are nearly impossible to replicate with synthesis because their physical mechanisms create imperfections and responses that algorithms cannot easily model.
A singing Tesla coil is not trying to sound like anything else. It sounds like itself, which is to say it sounds like electricity singing, which is a thing that should not work but does.
Sources: Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians; Linda Manzer official website on the Pikasso Guitar; ArcAttack performance documentation; Ontario Science Centre hydraulophone installation records; Heilung discography and instrument documentation.
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