The thumb piano, or kalimba, may go back thousands of years but in the hands of new media musician Leung Kei-cheuk, also known as GayBird, this ancient African musical instrument becomes something of the future.
The Signal Pipe, as he calls his modified version, produces not only different pitches but real-time visuals that can be projected onto a big screen when the iron bars are plucked.
"New media is a way for us to detect the future of music," says Leung, who graduated from the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts with a specialisation in music composition and electro-acoustics.
"Music and technology have always been closely related. Think how the development in woodcraft helps improve a piano's dynamics, for instance, or how the invention of pick-ups for guitars gave rise to rock.