An avant-garde sculptor and innovative furniture designer, Harry Bertoia started making sound-generating objects around 1960. Inspired by the clustered blades of desert grass, his sound sculptures were fashioned from a range of metals with different resonating properties. In this clip, we see his wife Brigitta – in the absence of her husband, who passed away in 1978 – generate rippling canopies of chiming tones by lightly brushing her fingers against the metal stalks. To this day, the instruments dwell inside the Sonambient Barn, a repurposed farm building at the back of the couple’s home in Pennsylvania. Here Bertoia, in collaboration with his musician brother Oreste, recorded ten albums between 1970 and his death, self-releasing them on his own Sonambient label. Also well worth checking out on YouTube is a less sonically oriented and more visually arresting 1965 documentary, which features the beret-clad, pipe-smoking Bertoia himself and beautifully conveys the elemental, rough-grained beauty of his sculptures.