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Musical Robots Invade Juilliard
roboRob writes "RoboRecital, a recent concert at the Juilliard School, featured four robot performers: GuitarBot, a self-playing guitar; an automated fifty-seven rank pipe organ; a Yamaha Disklavier, a modern player piano; and ModBots, a collection of robotic percussion instruments. This New York Times article and it this Juilliard Journal article discuss it." This beats the band-in-a-box automaton at Wall Drug by a fair stretch.
As a qualification, let me first point out that I'm a graduate student in music and helped construct several electronic music studios. Automation and programming are important issues in electronic music and the idea of a "perfect perfomance" All of these instruments are variants on the same basic idea of the player piano - recording and reproducing a performance on the same instrument. They are robots only in the limited sense of machines on a car assembly line. All of the instruments in the article can be MIDI-controlled; you can either pre-program them, record live, make post-recording additions or some other combination. Note that a basic MIDI file could be produced just by exporting out of Finale... Player pianos and their ilk were originally used for home entertainment, back before the days of radio and television. The machines that punched out the player piano [control] rolls were surprisingly accurate, later ones covering a fair range of dynamics. For a more complex performance, one could run the same roll back through the punching machine to add more notes - something George Gershwin did on several pieces, producing music unplayable by a single person at the piano. (As a sidenote, Yamaha has restored and "enhanced" several of Gershwin's piano rolls and included the data on the Diskclaviers for playback, as well as releasing a few CDs). Step forward several decades from Gershwin, and Gyorgi Ligeti produced a body of works for player piano and (roll-operated) barrel organ. These took Gershwin's double-punched ideas even further, producing pieces that could take 4, 6 or more hands to play. These are dazzling pieces, overwhelming the listener because there is so much going on. Now, the ModBots are cool because they're generalized controls you can adapt to just about any percussion instrument and/or surface. However, their programming is probably a tad bit tedious and getting a good range of dynamics is going to be a pain in the butt. Think of it as a variation on the drum machine, but hitting live instruments instead of playing samples. The Guitarbot would be cool, in that most of the efforts I've seen to produce one have, well, sucked, but there've been automata taking that approach before. The organ...old news. But the Diskclavier...that one is interesting. For those of you that don't know, the Yamaha Diskclavier is a grand piano fitted with recording and playback circuitry. Yamaha's other digital pianos use snythesis or sampling to reproduce sound; the Diskclavier does the actual generation with hammers striking strings. This creates a much more authentic sound (since a real piano mechanism is used), if not quite up to the "perfect reproduction" that Yamaha claims. There's a piano competition sponsored by Yamaha that includes long-distance judges who listen to the performance on a Diskclavier recieving webcast data; however, even with the webcast video that accompanies the feed, I believe that this "remote judging" misses out on the essential aspect of a live performance: watching a live performer. Syncing issues aside, there is no comparison towards being in a concert hall watching how a pianist moves, breaths and trembles in his/her playing to watching the same thing on video. Then there's a host of potential technical issues: if a key is sticky or less responsive on the performance Diskclavier, the pianist will compensate...but the extra force will sound wrong on the playback machine; one plays differently in different acoustic environments - an intimate performance in a parlor would sound very out of place in a large concert hall, and different frequencies are reproduced more wherever you go... Automation is a nifty tool, and useful when you don't have players around up to the stuffing of your works, but I don't expect it to replace live performers anytime soon.
De Bas Meister