Ellen Fullman

Ellen Fullman is an American composer, instrument builder, and performer who studied sculpture at the Kansas City Art Institute before moving to New York in the early 1980s. In Kansas City, she created and performed in an amplified metal sound-producing skirt and wrote art songs, which she recorded in New York for a small cassette label. In 1981, she began developing the Long String Instrument in her studio in Brooklyn — an instrument consisting of dozens of metallic strings up to seventy feet long, played with rosin-coated fingers and producing a chorus of organ-like partials.

The Long String Instrument has been compared to the experience of standing inside an enormous grand piano.