The masenko (Amharic: ማሲንቆ), also romanized in a large number of other ways, and also known by its Tigrigna name as a wata (ዋጣ), is a single-stringed bowed lute commonly used in the music of Ethiopia and Eritrea. It is essentially the national musical instrument of Ethiopia alongside the krar, and I think the masenko has an interesting contrast between how apparently simple it is with its singular string, with how hard it actually seems to play well in practice.

Quoting Wikipedia:

The single string is typically made of horse hair, and passes over a bridge. The instrument is tuned by means of a large tuning peg to fit the range of the singer’s voice. It may be bowed by either the right or left hand, and the non-bow hand sits lightly on top of the upper part of the string.

Wikipedia also explains that “the square or diamond-shaped resonator is made of four small wooden boards glued together, then covered with a stretched parchment or rawhide” — but as you see in the attached picture, there’s also a new kind of masenko in town in recent years: masenkos that use recycled plastic bottles as resonators.

I have no idea how common these plastic bottle masenkos actually are, but I think it’s a very interesting idea. Like I’ve always got a lot of empty plastic bottles laying around at home, and as a rule those bottles end up in the nearest reverse vending machine at the grocery store. But I’ve always sort of wanted a masenko, and it’s pretty cool to think that it’s at least hypothetically possible to build my own at home from recycled materials more easily than most stringed instruments.

I’ve never actually tried, though.

Are there any other musical instruments made from recycled plastic bottles or similar you know of?

The videos I screencapped for the attached picture are linked here: