The Beam

At least four San Francisco musicians claim to have invented "The Beam," a 12-foot length of hollow steel beam strung with piano wire and amplified with guitar pickups.  It's played with kettledrum beaters and steel rods, and gives an unworldly sound.  It's been used in several sci-fi movies.

All four have recorded with it. It would take some research to figure out who was first.  They were all in the early 1970s.

• Mickey Hart, drummer for the Grateful Dead
  
• Francesco Lupica (aka Frank Lupica, Francescoco Lupica, Francisco)
  
• Craig Huxley, creator of the Genesis Project
  
• Michael Stearns
  

On its lowest notes, this thing will rattle your fillings.

Wikipedia wrote:

The blaster beam was designed by John Lazelle in the early 1970s, and was first widely used by Francisco Lupica[1] who built several out of iron. American child actor turned musician Craig Huxley created his own refined version of the beam out of aluminum which was brought to fame in the soundtrack for Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) in which composer Jerry Goldsmith used the instrument to create the signature V'ger sound. Earlier that year, Huxley performed his custom-built blaster beam on Robert Prince's score for the season three Wonder Woman episode "Spaced Out".[2] The instrument was also used by composer James Horner for several of his early soundtracks, including Battle Beyond the Stars (1980) and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), Michael Stearns for his score to the IMAX film Chronos,[3] and in David Shire's soundtrack to 2010 (1984), which was co-written by Huxley. Huxley also played the instrument on the Quincy Jones song, "Ai No Corrida", in addition to other Quincy Jones productions like Michael Jackson's "Beat It."

Huxley successfully patented his design of the beam in 1984.[4]

The instrument has since been used to create dark unnatural sounds in other movie soundtracks in the late 1970s and early 1980s including the films The Black Hole, Forbidden World, Dreamscape, and Meteor, in the last of which it was used during shots of the giant looming meteorite as it approached Earth. It has also been used by new age artists including Kitaro, Stearns and Huxley. The blaster beam was also used for the seismic charge sound used by Jango Fett, in Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones.

Some more unexpected attention came in the early nineties when several women attending a music concert in New York's Central Park claimed to have been sexually stimulated to orgasm by the sound created by a blaster beam being used in the performance. This prompted Australian radio station 2SER-FM to conduct an experiment in which they played a continuous loop of a blaster beam performance and asked their female listeners to report any stimulation they experienced. On this occasion none of the show's listeners reported any arousal whatsoever.