An Unusual Violin,

for 2 reasons, firstly it is black,

secondly it is made of stone! phototgraph Gabriel Urbanek / Lars Widenfalk via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0) Swedish sculptor Lars Widenfalk in the late 1980s, while chiselling away at a piece of diabase and being impressed by the pleasant sound it made when hit with hammer and chisel decided to make a violin out of the material, the instrument was based on drawings by Stradivarius, but with modifications that allow it to be played, it was not until 1990 that he finally got his hands on a piece of diabase large enough to be sculpted into a life-size violin, but as soon as he did, he got to work. In the end, he needed a second piece for the back of the violin, but after two years of hard work, Blackbird, the stone violin named after the homonymous bird, was finally completed, “It was the sound of Mother Earth and I wondered if it could be captured in an instrument carved from the stone that had emerged from deep inside the Earth,” Widenfalk told Gulf News, in 2005. “What drove me on was the desire to discover the limits to which this stone can be pushed as an artistic material.” believe it or not, the first piece of diabase obtained by the Swedish sculptor for his unique project came from his grandfather’s tomb. When the family grave was renovated, a large piece of diabase was discarded, so he claimed it as the main medium of his one-of-a-kind diabase violin. However, the first piece proved insufficient, so Widenfalk  ended up sourcing Harjedalan rock, which resembles diabase, from Sweden’s mountains,

the burning question is of course what does it sound like? listening to the above video I am not sure if it is better or worse than a wooden violin, but then it was made by a sculptor in stone not in wood, in any event a totally different violin.