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A song of ice and wire
The Swedish town of Luleå is becoming famous for its incredible ice orchestra
Forget watching an orchestra play in the warm comfort of an ornate concert hall. How about a night of music in an igloo, with instruments made almost entirely from ice?
For the past 15 years, a small Swedish town just south of the Arctic Circle has taken music to this chilly extreme.
The Ice Music project in Luleå, Sweden, was founded by Tim Linhart. The sculptor and artist carefully crafts all the "ICEstruments" himself — no small feat considering that the ice must remain a specific temperature to have the right amount of elasticity needed for sculpting.
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The instruments are so delicate that even a musician's body heat and breath can cause the ice to melt and the instrument to go out of tune. For that reason, the ice violins and violas hang from the ceiling and must be played with plastic protection shields.
So how do the ICEstruments differ in sound from their more traditional, non-melting brethren?
"Ice instruments have a more detailed sound than wood, which absorbs the vibrations from the strings and dampens the sound," Linhart tells CNN. "Ice is stiffer. It picks up all the vibrations."
"You might think the sound on a normal instrument is perfectly clear — until you hear an ice instrument and go, 'Ah ha!'"
Samantha Rollins is TheWeek.com's news editor. She has previously worked for The New York Times and TIME and is a graduate of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.
