The Super Mario Themes are meanwhile a cultural measure on how obscure devices, objects and instruments you can play music. Whether it's a ruler, two guitars, hands, tesla coils and lightning, bass guitar and so on and on. Or this video. Wine bottles, filled with water in a row. A remote-controlled car is driving along this bottles to play this music. Good guys. Proof of concept and hours of preperation spent.
For your convenince the incredible tesla coils again:
Sound-Machines made by Festo came play by 2007. The composition is very interesting and was made by Elena-Kats Chernin. Music that touches the borders of experimental, pop-appeal and classical music. Music for robots is, what I think, a very interesting opportunity to enhance the level of computer-based music.
A similar work from the artworld is the computer-played band by Jeremy Boyle. The example showed here is playing the guitar with picks and switches.
Be prepared for the biggest networked robot installation that has been so far. Absolut, that one of your favorite drinks, enabled a huge project: the Absolut Machines. The project features two robot-halls: one in New York City, the other in Stockholm. Everyone can log in and play live with the robots. They are music creatures.
The results are filmed and streamed live into the internet, so not only you can see the action, but also other the people in the world logged in. By playing short music-sequences robot is animated to interpret the entered data and it plays additional sequences to it. An exploration of artificial creativity. The sound generation is not only a software thing. The sequences are triggered by real physical instruments, for example by ping-pong balls that fly across the air and hit brandy glasses. And everybody can watch it. That's what I call maximalism! Sometimes you can spot some people in the robot-hall maintaining the system or just hanging around.
The project was made by two former MIT-lab members, namely Dan Paluska and Jeff Liberman. Please note that beautiful DOS-styled operating system. If this isn't a hint, than what else?
This weblog is dedicated to fresh and alternate views on robotics. We will focus especially in music robots, toy robots, play and game and robots as well as the culture of robots. We are the the first robot-blog from Germany - and maybe from Europe - that write regularly on this topic! This blog is made by the same people around the Digital Tools Magazine. We will have some nice surprises later this year, so stay tuned!
