The Weird Little Industry Behind a Mesmerizing Instrument

Josiah Collett, a 10-year-old autistic boy from Broxbourne, England, had always struggled with social interactions. But things were getting worse. In school, his peers told him that he shouldn’t be alive. He spent nights crying, unable to explain to his parents what had happened.

“He was retreating into his own world,” his mother Georgia told me. “We couldn’t get through to him, and he couldn’t get through to us.”

During a family vacation to Belgium, the Collett family heard a “gorgeous, hypnotic sound” coming from the distance. They followed it down the street and found a busker playing something that looked like a cross between a caveman tool and a flying saucer. The busker tapped the instrument, called a “handpan,” which emitted both drum-like rhythms and delicate harmonies.