ENTERTAINMENT THE ROBERT MINDEN ENSEMBLE : Of Sound Mind : Anything from a saw to a shell or a stainless steel bowl becomes a musical instrument in the hands of this storyteller.

When Robert Minden sees a vacuum cleaner hose, a screen window, a sheet of metal and a conch shell, he hears a chorus of sounds imitating a raging coastal storm.

Dried peas scattered across a screen window create the waves hitting the shore. The howling wind, pounding rain and other haunting ocean sounds come from shaking the metal sheet and blowing into the vacuum cleaner hose and the conch shell.

Minden makes extraordinary sounds from ordinary things: spoons, glasses, garbage cans, wood, drain pipes, even Slinkies. Now add the strains of classical music and Minden’s storytelling skills, and that sums up the Robert Minden Ensemble, a group like no other.

The ensemble will perform on April 10 in a 7 p.m. show at Buena High School in Ventura. The show is for families with kids 7 or older who will be amazed at the celestial sounds that come out of, say, a metal oven rack.

With Minden onstage are daughters Dewi and Andrea who play trumpet and flute, and Carla Hallett, who plays French horn. All are accomplished classical musicians who double on the more mundane instruments.

Minden likes to call the group a kind of environmental chamber orchestra. It’s also been described as a sort of New Age radio show with the four darting about the stage providing the ethereal sound effects.

The show is headlined “The Boy Who Wanted to Talk to Whales” and features the ensemble’s centerpiece. It’s a story Robert Minden wrote and narrates about a boy who dreams of talking to whales. He rows out to sea with a contraption that he hopes will make a sound pleasing to the whales. From there he embarks on a journey filled with discovery.

Another story of Minden’s is about a colorful old street musician who plays the carpenter’s handsaw. The story is rooted in Minden’s past and tells how the ensemble got started.

Minden, on a West Coast tour with the ensemble this month, retold the story recently in a telephone interview.

During the early 1980s he was a sociology professor at UC Santa Cruz. One afternoon he was mulling over a class lecture when a mysterious, entrancing sound wafted through his office window. He followed the sound and met Tom Scribner, an ex-vaudevillian and lumberjack who taught him how to play the saw.

“I felt he was an exquisite musician even though he couldn’t read a word of music,” Minden said.

The chance meeting brought him back to his musical roots, Minden said. As a child growing up in Toronto, he was schooled in piano and composition at the Royal Conservatory of Music. He dropped his musical studies in college to pursue sociology.

“Sociology was unbelievably exciting then,” he said. “It was on the cutting edge of discovery.”

He brought his daughters together to perform as an ensemble at Expo ’86 in Vancouver. Based there, they’ve been touring ever since. They’ve also performed on television and radio.

Living on the West Coast, Minden said, made him more attuned to the fragility of his surroundings. His whale story is a metaphor of sorts that he hopes will reconnect listeners to their environment and awaken their consciousness.

He is a student of sounds. “Stainless steel bowls present endless possibilities,” he said. “We’re now creating some new sounds out of elastic bands and wood.”

Setting up the instruments for a show takes an entire day. He calls it a “fiddly” science. Tuning something such as the water-filled glass bottles looks deceptively simple.

“We’re out there,” he said, “with an eyedropper filled with water.”

His show lasts one hour and, because it contains a lot of narration, children under 7 will find it difficult to sit through, he said. Nonetheless, it’s a show for adults and children.

* WHERE AND WHEN

The Robert Minden Ensemble will perform April 10 at 7 p.m. at Buena High School in Ventura. Advance tickets are $5.50 for kids, $7.50 for adults and $6.50 for seniors; $1 more at the door. Tickets available at Adventures for Kids in Ventura, McCabe’s Music in Santa Paula or Serendipity Toys in Ojai. For information, call 646-6997 or 650-9688.