This video captures some of the construction details of a DIY computer-controlled glockenspiel, then offers a cover of Jean Michel Jarre’s Aerology as a demo.

via organfairy:

Instead of just banging on some bells with some hand held mallets I decided to make a set of electrically operated bells.

Actually it is two sets of kindergarten glockenspiels that was tuned in C. But I put them together and tuned one of them a semitone higher so that I got a chromatic scale.

I build a wooden frame and added a motor driven mallet for each bell and finally build a control circuit for it. It can be controlled by a computers parallel port or by simple switches – like the switches under a keyboard.

It doesn’t have MIDI but I might build a MIDI interface for it.

The melody that goes with this video is “Aerology” by Jean Michel Jarre. It was originally played on big tubular bells. But I think my small fairy-bells does a good job here. The other sounds are played on the Yamaha HE-8 and Technics SX-C600 organs, Roland E-15 and SH-2000 synthesizers, Yamaha VSS-30 toy keyboard, and Korg Rhytm 55 drum machine.