Well, it is, sorta. But 50’s science fiction movies would never have been the same without it.

Here’s a video of Leon Theremin playing his own instrument:

The Japanese, of course, know how to take anything weird and push it over the top: Here’s an orchestra of young ladies playing Beethoven’s 9th on theremins built into Russian Matrochka dolls:

But thanks to modern technology (and some retro technology), people have figured out all sorts of new ways to make music.

Some geek figured out how to program old 5.25″ floppy drives to make music. This is not good for the drives, but it’s pretty cool:

But a good idea can always be made better:

Not to be outdone, Steve Ward and Jeff Larson realized that Tesla coils could be made to become musical:

The physics behind this feat is explained at Physics Buzz.

While Mario Brothers sounded good, I think Inspector Gadget sounded better:

And one last one, the most complex effort I’ve seen in this medium:

There are far more odd ways to make music than I could list here, but these were some which tickled my fancy.

Edit: Thanks to Inshadowz who pointed out this one using a dot-matrix printer to play “Eye of the Tiger”

Edit 2: Here’s a captivating demonstration of how using the same principle can create speech using nothing but a piano (The narration is in German, but the captions are adequate):

The Old Wolf has spoken.