DAVE KING established SOUND WORLD in 1989.
Dave is a genuine musical all-rounder - singer, pianist, composer, arranger, instrument maker, multi-instrumentalist and teacher with long experience in many fields of music.
For SOUND WORLD Dave was commissioned to construct three sound sculptures for the Japan Festival at The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew (see SOUND WORLD AT KEW). He has created large scale bamboo sound sculptures for Yorkshire Sculpture Park, The Firebird Trust and the London Contemporary Dance Trust, worked in educational making residencies with the BBC National Orchestra Of Wales, the Barbican Centre and sinfonia ViVA among many others, and run bamboo instrument workshops at the Eden Project, the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, WOMAD (in Reading, Morecambe, Caceres (Spain), and Las Palmas (Canary Islands), as well as in schools, academies and colleges all over the UK.
SOUND WORLD has created all kinds of instruments from bamboo over the last 30 years - flutes, recorders, reed instruments, didjeridus, xylophones, rainsticks, rattlesticks, angklungs, tingkliks, pellet drums, wind xylophones, shishi odoshi (deer scarers), log drums, stamping tubes, sistra, wind chimes, panpipes; as well as shop fittings, stage sets, shelving, furniture, hifi equipment and stands, all using bamboo.
Dave has worked as Musical Director of various theatre companies, including seven years with Horse + Bamboo, as well as Company of Imagination and Chol.
He is a versatile singer with The B Naturals; runs two other choirs (Akabella and Macapello) and has written dozens of arrangements and compositions for singing groups (see SUMPTUOUS SONGBOOKS).
Dave is also a renowned jazz pianist, composer and educator: in 1999 his 'Black Roads' suite for jazz septet was premiered to great acclaim at the Wiltshire Music Centre. He wrote a hit song cycle, 'Martin Luther King', for primary school children to sing at the Wiltshire Small Schools Music Festival in 2011, and for ten years was Project Administrator and Musical Director of the Wiltshire and Swindon Special Schools Music Festival.
BAMBOO
'The usefulness of a vessel is the space within it…'
Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching
SOUND WORLD is committed to using sustainable and recycled materials wherever possible.
To this end, most SOUND WORLD instruments use bamboo as primary material.
Bamboo is among the fastest growing species on earth (some species can grow as much as one metre in a day) and (properly cultivated) is one of the most prolific of all raw materials with a multiplicity of potential uses from high-rise scaffolding in Hong Kong to light-bulb filaments, bicycle frames, flooring, furniture, construction…(etc., etc.).
Bamboo is very strong, light, naturally beautiful and inherently musical.
Photograph by Teruo Araya, courtesy National Geographic
Bamboo grows more abundantly and much further afield from the stereotype of the Far East than many people realise. It is not an endangered species and actually makes an extremely valid substitute for many applications involving wood and/or metal.
It behoves us to utilise bamboo as a planetary model of beauty and reciprocal growth.
Contact SOUND WORLD for more details 
HANDMADE MULTICULTURAL MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS