Whacky Music

Craig Ramsell '73, SM '74, makes music with Boomwhackers, colorful plastic tubes that are tuned by length.

It's Sunday afternoon at the American International Toy Fair, and Craig Ramsell, founder and president of Whacky Music, attracts a crowd at his booth in Manhattan's cavernous Jacob K. Javits Convention Center.

Ramsell--an inventor, salesman, and showman--is wearing a hard hat with colored plastic tubes sticking out of it at various angles. A vest festooned with the same kinds of tubes is buckled around his chest. He takes rubber mallets and strikes the tubes with alacrity. The spectators recognize the tune--"Old MacDonald"--and they chuckle when Ramsell sings the words in a Donald Duck falsetto.

"We don't call our company Whacky Music for nothing," says Ramsell.

The February afternoon at the Javits Center is just another day at the office for Ramsell '73, SM '74, a financial analyst whose midlife career change transported him from corporate suites to the toy and music-education marketplace.

It all began 11 years ago when Ramsell was taking out the trash. He had a cardboard gift-wrap tube that was longer than local recycling regulations permitted. So he cut it into two different lengths and, on a lark, whacked the pieces on his thighs.

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"I heard their different tones, and the light went off," says Ramsell, who lives in Sedona, AZ. "I figured if I could tune them, I could play music." Ramsell's first tube was middle C. That note, he found after some experimentation, could be produced with a tube that was 24.73 inches long and had a diameter of 1.75 inches. He then determined the lengths of tubing needed to produce other notes, using a mathematical formula that correlates pitch with a tube's diameter and the total distance that air moves through the tube.

By 1995, Ramsell had made six plastic tubes of varying lengths that played a half-dozen notes of the pentatonic scale. But the instrument was not an overnight success. In 1995, his first run of 10,000 plastic tubes made out of cellulose acetate butyrate, or CAB, was a failure, because repetitive stress caused half of them to break. It took Ramsell two more years of research before he settled on a plastic called high-density polyethylene, or HDPE, which is commonly used for containers of milk or shampoo. Musical tubes made from the material have proved almost indestructible.