Bilal and I know how to play music. Andrew doesn’t. Fortunately, that doesn’t stop him from trying.

Bilal and I have brought instruments into shop, laying upstairs for when we need to let thoughts percolate in our head. More often than not, this translates into going upstairs when we’ve reached a wellhead of frustration on a given project, and we bang that frustration out in music. Lately, this has primarily been on a double bass I’ve rented from a local music store and a cello. And double basses are big, as in so large that we could all comfortably kayak down the river on top of it.

But it’s not just the musical aspect of these instruments that is intriguing. We build things out of silicon and metal and nylon bearings and bits of data. These instruments are made of wood, and the engineering paradigm that goes into them is completely different than anything we’re used to. Wood is…bizarre. Aside from 2x4s and plywood, there’s no real standardization of wood quality, it all depends on the tree it came from and how it grew and how it was harvested and treated. To be sure, there are also several different grades of steels and aluminums due to different manufacturing processes, but not nearly with the same finely nuanced variation as instrument wood. Every double bass or cello is different, whereas we can design metal mechanicals that roll off much more nearly the same. Simply put, it’s the art of the organic that is fascinating in the cello and double bass.

We strive to achieve artful awesomeness in our design principles, but we’re working with a pot of standardized parts shared by thousands of electrical and mechanical engineers. We don’t have to select the temper or grain of the wood for the tone we hope it will produce, so instead we have to balance aesthetic elegance and utilitarian interfaces. In a respect, engineering is sort of like music in that we are using the powerful tools around us to call forth things into the world that have never been there before. And that is fundamentally awesome.