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This Teeny-Tiny, Handmade Pipe Organ Is Utterly Delightful

Here's your "Awwww" and "Whoa!!" moment for today: a demonstration of a teeny-tiny, working pipe organ. It's an instrument made out of nothing but paper and cardboard (with one side covered by translucent plastic so that you can see its inner workings), and it's powered by nothing but an inflated balloon.

The inventor, Aliaksei Zholner, whose YouTube profile lists him as living in Belarus, has also posted video demonstrations of some of his other amazing paper creations, including a working (toy-sized) tank, drills, gears and a firecracker launcher.

But the most charming one has to be this organ, for which he's also posted some sketches and models on a Russian forum dedicated to paper-based engineering. He wrote on that site that it was his wife who suggested that he work on something like a music box, which led him to creating this paper instrument.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Anastasia Tsioulcas is a reporter on NPR's Arts desk. She is intensely interested in the arts at the intersection of culture, politics, economics and identity, and primarily reports on music. Recently, she has extensively covered gender issues and #MeToo in the music industry, including backstage tumult and alleged secret deals in the wake of sexual misconduct allegations against megastar singer Plácido Domingo; gender inequity issues at the Grammy Awards and the myriad accusations of sexual misconduct against singer R. Kelly.