This Friday’s Dufferin Grove dinner has a new guest – the Nessie Hydraulophone - an interactive, water based musical instrument invented by FUNtain.ca.

Nessie is a fun tadpole shaped musical instrument. She is five feet long, shape like a tadpole, and invites you to see what happens when your finger covers one of her spouts. The music created is reminiscent of a flute meeting an organ. It sounds beautiful, unique, and of course watery!

Nessie made an appearance at Dufferin Grove last summer. The local children and their parents loved her. FUNtain has been trying to add her to the new park design but has found the city less than excited about a new park feature that educates and engages.

FUNtain has decided to donate one to the park! The instrument/toy is free to the park if funds necessary for installation and maintenance can be raised by the city or community.

Come play music with water and have fun this Friday, March 27th with your neighbours!

Part sculpture, part public art, part interactive water feature, and in all ways fun, Nessie enables children, adults, and anyone who cares to give her a try the ability to create musical notes, harmonies, and melodies by manipulating the flow of water from Nessie’s water jets. There are twelve jets, each corresponding to a note of the musical scale. Play her like a piano.

Public spaces, gardens and parks should inspire, engage, and interact with their visitors. Hydraulophones reinvent what these spaces can be and our relationship to them.

Originally designed with kids in mind, they take to Nessie immediately. She is approachable and inspires curiousity. The soothing qualities and natural wonder of water swirling through your hands is a feeling that lingers in all of us from childhood. Watch children with no musical training experience this elemental fascination while easily picking up melodies such as "the wheels on the bus" or "twinkle twinkle little star”. A day at the park becomes rewarding and educational as kids and their parents discover music through playing in water. Is this a music lesson or playtime? Learning music just became a lot more fun

At the core of the Nessie model of the Hydraulophone is the idea to create new tools that encourage children to explore their senses from a perspective of unstructured play, and infuses gaiety and merriment into inquiry, theory building and co-construction of knowledge. This nurtures a sense of engagement and wonder that is the foundation of scientific and musical exploration.

Invention, design, and art converge at FUNtain, the inventors of the Hydraulophone. They dream of the musical possibilities of water. With instruments of the past you played solid matter or air to make music. Now you can play liquid.

The FUNtain Hydraulophone Lab is located across from the Art Gallery of Ontario at 330 Dundas St. in the art and design district of Toronto. Look for the building with the giant pink Nessie on the wall! You are invited to come by and give one of the Hydraulophones a try. Come have some fun and be a part of the evolution of interactive art and musical instruments..