The “Härjedalspipa”, “shepherds flute” in our context called the Nordic Low Whistle, is a Swedish cylindrical flute, build by craftsman Gunnar Stenmark.The model is a result of folk music research, and has also been further developed by musician’s preferences. This particular instrument is a seven-hole whistle, made of slow grown fir-wood.
The Nordic Psalmodikon is a single-stringed instrument with a haunting tone, captured in multiple articulations for cinematic and creative music production. The Psalmodikon is a Scandinavian single-stringed instrument for playing hymns in churches. In the early 19th century, many Christian congregations couldn’t afford an organ, so members built their own instruments as substitutes. To simplify the task of learning to play hymns, they burnt numbers into the Psalmodikon. These marked notes on the instrument that corresponded to numbers on printed psalms. The players didn’t have to know musical notation, only to play after the numbers written. Our approach when sampling the Psalmodikon was not to make it “realistic” in the traditional sense. We treated it more progressively, with an open mind as to how it could sound, instead of how it ought to sound.
