Walter Kitundu is a 2008 Macarthur Fellowship winning sound artist and inventor of original musical instruments. His work is inspired by hip-hop, and traditional Asian and African instruments, Kitundu’s phonoharps are hybrids of turntables and stringed instruments. The phonoharps offer a wide range of melodic possibilities. The turntable’s pickup collects and amplifies any sound transmitted to it, allowing the performer to employ percussion and string resonance as well as digital manipulation, or sampling, of prerecorded material. Kitundu has created hand-built record players driven by the wind and rain, fire and earthquakes, birds, light, and the force of ocean waves. kitundu.com