Music from a waving arm, a Shrek grieves his father, and sheep on the grave. Human, all too human, are these videos

Our semi-regular survey of signs and wonders from the web… First is a video of the various ranges of music-making taken from the more unpredictable parts of our bodies - the work of The Voxel Lab. Below, from Aeon:

Musical innovation tends to happen at the nexus of experimentation, play and happy accidents. As one Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) student explains in this video, the overdriven guitar fuzz sound that’s become so familiar in rock and blues was ‘discovered’ via a tech malfunction.

Taking viewers inside the Voxel Lab at MIT, where students can pursue almost any idea at the intersection of music and engineering imaginable, the short film surveys several projects being built in the space. With their creations ranging from a marble-powered ‘Rube Goldberg music maker’ to a spiked, sound-generating electronic glove, participants are given the rare freedom to build new instruments and generate novel sounds – and, just maybe, stumble upon the next big thing in music.

From Staff Picks At Vimeo, here’s “Donkey” - a beautifully rendered tale of a son, down on his luck, coming to his father’s death bed - and giving him an unconventional last moment of joy.

From Aeon, again

In Some Kind of Intimacy, the UK director Toby Bull considers the unknowable inner lives of the sheep that roam near, and often on, his parents’ graves. During a phonecall with his brother, he wonders: do they in some way know that their parents are buried below? Could sheep ever know such a thing? Would they even need to know for the scene to have some sort of meaning? Comprised of sparse shots of the landscape in Shropshire where his parents are buried, Bull’s short film forms an original and poignant meditation on loss.