The main inspiration driving the development of the first udderbot was the desire to explore microtones. There were other key factors present as essential catalysts, which included (1) a history of playing in handbell choir, (2) difficulty in letting things go, (3) The School for Designing a Society.
It was the spring of 2005, my sophomore year at Rice University majoring in Music Composition. I had been bitten by the microtonal music bug in the spring of 2003, my senior year in high school, and had been pursuing a variety of roads to the realization of acoustic microtonality since: retuning a reed organ to an overtone scale; writing in twelfth-tones in a chamber music setting for my music school peers; beginning to timidly approach the behemoth of writing xenharmonically for what I perceived as microtonally clumsy Western woodwinds.
A "study break" was sponsored by my residential college. Root beer floats! Sticky and sweet. Gosh, are they just going to throw away all these glass root beer bottles? I see some potential here. Rushing upstairs and grabbing a red milk crate, a gathered up as many bottles as I could. Rinsed them out in the bathroom sink. (Bathroom sinks, incidentally, tend to be annoyingly small for doing anything with an udderbot; often it is impossible to fill a tenor or even alto udderbot under a standard handwashing sink. Water fountains I've found slightly more agreeable. Kitchen sinks, it varies. A utility sink is ideal.)
Having played in my church's handbell choir in middle school, I was able to reach for a similar situation with tuned bottles. The final concert of my Practicum in Contemporary Music class premiered Kluh, two short pieces in the very fascinating Squares[11] scale, a subset of 31-tone equal temperament, scored for 11 players playing 21 bottles. The rhythmic challenge of hocketing melody was exciting if imperfect. The intonation suffered from the variance in players' embouchures. Also, I had to keep filling up the bottles to the correct water level in the cramped bathroom sink. (The solution to evaporating water is apparently to use mineral oil, but I have not tried it, ick.)
Months later, in June of 2005, I participated in the Summer School for Designing a Society, in which the question "What would I consider a desirable society?" is given serious playful thoughtful discussion, and taken is input to creative projects. My design group explored their desires for society through music, creating a 40-minute nature-walk-performance that featured built instruments which incorporated the trees of the landscape. (Among our designs was that forests would receive a vote in the domain of human politics!) Throughout the month in preparation, I hoarded beer bottles that other participants were throwing away; I had extra incentive knowing that glass was not accepted for recycling in that part of West Virginia.
In the course of accumulating 120 bottles, I managed to have the a-ha moment: What if I could obtain all the pitches I needed from just one bottle...by removing the bottom and bobbing it up and down on a surface of water?
The "eureka moment" came a day later, after taking a hammer to a beer bottle and affixing what little remained of the bottle to a length of thick PVC with yellow electrical tape. Bobbing it up and down in a bucket (or while submerged in a pond, as we did in the final nature-walk-performance) did yield the expected glissando effect. However, there was a major problem: the fact that the water was not enclosed meant that the pressure from the player's air pushed the water level down, only for the water to spring back up, resulting in an uneasy slow vibrato. There was no way to hold a steady pitch!
The solution to this issue came in July, as I was sharing the creation with some friends from high school. Horn player Matt Gray suggested attaching a rubber glove, and upon doing that, it was off to the races.
I have no idea if destiny played any role in the genesis of the udderbot, as so many details along the way seemed so random and arbitrary.
To make things even weirder, it's completely possible that the udderbot was for ages created and played in folk situations in the Appalachian mountains of Pennsylvania. We have anecdotal accounts but no hard evidence for this claim.