Mexico City, Mexico — Some of the illegal guns that have been seized in northern Mexico are now making music.

The project began last year when a phone call from "someone who works in government" offered Mexican sculptor Pedro Reyes a chance to make art with the guns. The caller asked if Reyes would be interested in working with guns seized in and around Ciudad Juarez, a city of 1.3 million in northern Mexico just across the border from El Paso, Texas.

"Normally, they bury or destroy them," said Reyes, who has given firearms a new lease on life — as musical instruments.

For two projects — one titled "Imagine," the other "Disarm" — Reyes was able to choose his material from about 6,700 guns that were turned in or seized by the army and police.

Now, mechanical hammers ping against ammunition magazines from assault rifles; gun barrels cut to different lengths ring like marimbas; pistol parts strike metal plates, like cymbals, to create rhythmic, syncopated sounds; magazines from semi-automatic weapons form frames for stringed instruments; and gun barrels have become pan pipes.

Reyes holds a guitar sculpted from recycled firearms

"This project has a pacifist intent, to create a global consciousness about arms trafficking," Reyes said in an interview as he demonstrated some of his computer controlled instruments that played a sort of industrial pop tinged with marimba.

Reyes already was known for a 2008 project called "Palas por Pistolas," or "Pistols to Shovels," in which he melted down 1,527 weapons to make the same number of shovels to plant the same number of trees.

He stresses that his work is "a proposal, not a protest."

"It occurred to me to make musical instruments, because music is the opposite of weapons," Reyes said. "This exercise of transformation we see with the guns, is what we would like to see in society."

Reyes is taking his message international, with the exhibition of the musical instruments in London's Lisson Gallery held last Tuesday and another at a later date in the United States.