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Writer's pictureSylvain Paslier

The Hydro Map — Mini-Series with Colin Foulke

Colin's map on the wall shows all the handpan makers who have adopted his water-pressure invention to form handpan shells called "hydroforming".


Classically trained on the cello, Colin slowly grew weary of jumping through the hoops of institutionalized western music... but then he discovered the handpan and embarked on a journey that would dramatically change his everyday life.


In part 2, Colin walks us through his discovery and development of hydroforming, a revolutionary process to shape handpan shells. He also re-visits the roots or the art form and reconnects with his first instrument, the cello.



Mini-Series Transcript:


Sylvain: So this is the world map of all the makers using your hydro-forming method.


Colin: Yeah, to the best of my knowledge, most of these people have messaged me directly to say either, "Hey, I did this and I'm here and thank you". Or sometimes it's been, they've said like, "Hey, I'm working on it and I bumped into this problem". And so it's mostly been through just open communication that I've been informed that there is machines like these around the world. And again, this is the people who've chosen to contact me about it, which is a lot of people. Um, it's been a really interesting thing to kind of slowly track and um, it's on every continent except for Australia right now, to my knowledge which I was down in Australia and I was like, what are you guys doing, my map is blank. I want, you know, I want to get all the continents. But um, yeah, so like a really interesting smattering to, um, you know, there's interesting clumps, uh, quite a few California partly cause I'm here, but also they're just a little more industry here. A huge clump in, uh, Brazil and around South Palo. And then, um, yeah, kind of a smattering across Europe and then a nice concentration in Israel and then, um, one down in South Africa and then, and now a few over in Asia and one up in Siberia, India. It's been a really amazing way to kind of visualize how this idea has kind of wrapped the globe. Um, and I had a lot of these represent people who took my original idea and improved upon it. And so, you know, some of these, uh, these dots I'm indebted to and that they told me about their, their improvements and I was able to improve my machine as well. So, um, yeah, if, if there's one thing in the shop that I'm most proud of at this point, it's probably this, um, yeah, it was a big idea to share it. It's been really, really fascinating to see the impact. Um, it's been this really interesting way to kind of open up really worldwide conversations with people that I probably wouldn't have run into without doing that. So, yeah, this is a pretty, pretty proud reminder of, you know, how an idea can have a pretty good worldwide impact.


Colin: Come on, Australia.

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