Who Picked The Typer Piper?

Tony Plaut did.

An art professor at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa, Tony loves to play with his creative mind. He loves to tinker. He loves to collect old typewriters. And he's fascinated with gizmos that work without electricty.

Enter the Typer Piper, an apparatus constructed from an old manual Remington typewriter, six wooden flutes from a collection of dozens discarded by a former student, a spare tire mounted to a rusty rim, a hand operated air pump and hoses connected to regulators. (See today's Ramblin' column in The Gazette.)

The resultant Typer Piper plays music as you type, although every key doesn't produce a note. Those are reserved for six special keys -- Y, K, O, N, space and period. (If you want to see and here the Typer Piper in action, click here.)

Why?

Because, ever since he saw a show of Yoko Ono's artwork in Minneapolis a decade ago, Tony has been fascinated with her artwork. After all, she was well-known in artistic circles before she met John Lennon and made headlines with the Beatles. She's still well-known in those circles.

Tony had the Typer Piper on display at Cornell in January, 2008, as part of his "Yoko and  the Window Wall" exhibit. A major part of that exhibit was an antique one-way telephone in which Tony received a call from Yoko. But most of the exhibit featured various ways he typed her name. One panel might have all Ys, the next all Os, the next all Ks and so on. Others were mixes of the letters Y, K, O, and N.

So, you see, his construction of the Typer Piper, which has been on display in various shows since, was a natural.

And, if you're creative, you can play a song on it. One student, Tony says, can play "When the Saints Go Marching In."

I'm waiting for someone to play a Beatles tune. How about "Ballad of John and Yoko" for starters?