Tenrai Ocarina
What the museum holds of tenraiocarina.com, a southern California workshop founded in 2010, and on what terms.
A note from the museum
This page records what the museum holds of a website that is no longer online, and what it may do with it. It is not by the people who made it, and nothing from the site is republished here.
The museum’s account of the workshop, with a chronology, is at Tenrai Ocarina.
Tenrai Ocarina sold handmade ocarinas from tenraiocarina.com. Its own About page gives the founding: “In late 2010, Tenrai Ocarina was born.” The earlier version of the site adds that it was a company founded in southern california.
What the site held
It was rebuilt at least once, and the museum holds both. The first was hand-written PHP — index.php, story.php, media.php — with a one-page shop listing sixteen models and an Instagram feed widget. The second was a Squarespace site with a collection, a media page and a journal, which carried Tenrai’s YouTube videos.
The catalog ran from six-hole pendants at $29.99 — Banana Spice, Monsoon Seas, Red Halo, Sky Cloud, Blue Azure, Blue Grotto, Floral Fantasy, Green Tea, Rose Granite, Waterfall, Black Gloss — through eight-hole pendants at $39.99 and a 13-hole Transverse Pro, up to the Ocarina of Time at $279.99. The media page listed five demonstration videos on the workshop’s own instruments.
How it ended. The last capture showing a working site is September 1, 2021. For years afterwards the front page returned 403 Forbidden while api/1/performance/settings still returned 200 — the machinery still wired up and refusing to serve, which is what a site looks like when it has been switched off rather than taken down. By September 2026 nothing answered on any scheme, by name or by address.
What the museum holds
69 files, 2.6 MB.
| 28 | pages |
| 23 | photographs and illustrations |
| 4 | small images that are page furniture rather than pictures — buttons, rules, spacers |
Saved from the Internet Archive in September 2026.
What the museum holds back, and why
A personal name appears in the Squarespace site’s machinery, and the museum has not published it and will not. A name in a content management system records who set the site up. That is not the same as who made the instruments — it could as easily be a partner, a relative, or somebody paid to build the site — and a maker’s identity is not a thing to settle from a metadata field. The name is held privately with the rest of the copy.
The contact address from the PHP-era site stays in the copy too, like every other address of a living person here.
Rights, and what is published
Nothing from the site is published. The maker has not yet been asked. Preserving something and publishing it are different acts, and the museum will do the first without the second.
If this is your work, please write to theocarinamuseum@gmail.com — the museum would be glad to be corrected, and gladder still to be told the rest of the story.