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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.
Yeah, this isn't even a technically impressive robotic guitar, it's just a novelty item of the sort you might see at an exhibition of modern art. The pieces it plays are not anything like what a human can do. I would be much more impressed if someone made a live version of this robotic performance. (download the mpeg2 version, the others suck)
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
You are missing the point.
To get a robot slide guitar player that plays in tune is very difficult with mechanical methods. While there were fairground organs with violins, they really were more like hurdy-gurdys. The pitch resolution is in microtones. To do that without electronics would be impossible.
Even humans find it tricky.
And have you heard it?? I just downloaded the MOV file and the music is APPALLING... however I'm not sure whether that's the robot's fault or the composer's... it would be interesting to hear this attempt something like Rodrigo's Concierto.
A friend of mine is a pretty successful pipe organ restorer and he says that for well over a decade modern pipe organs have been set up with MIDI interfaces from the consoles to the actuators that actually control the pipes. Many restoration projects on older pipe organs involve replacing older mechanical or electric consoles with MIDI. So, as far as I can tell, it sounds like there's nothing special going on with this organ. The guy has just replaced the console with a laptop as the MIDI input device.
yea i stole your sig- whats the big deal, it sucked anyway.
My girlfriend works at a gallery on the UC Irvine campus called the Beall Center for Art & Technology and they currently have an installation of some of the LEMUR "robots". Frankly, I was a little disappointed as they are more funky MIDI instrument than robot, but if you're in or near Orange County, CA, go check it out.
Instruments played by machine are hardly new. More impresive than a robot that plays guitar, a robot that plays piano, or "a collection of robotic percussion instruments" would be a robot that plays "a piano, two ranks of organ pipes (flute and violin), mandolin, snare drum, bass drum, timpani, cymbal, and triangle." Now that would be really impressive, especially since you would have to travel all the way to The National Music Museum" Vermillion, South Dakota to see one that was made in 1913! The machine is called an "Orchestrion" and they were common in the early part of the last century, as the musical accompaniment to a ride on a merry-go-round.
In 1999 I decided to write a piece for disklavier. Not being a pianist, I found the human limitations of pianists frustrating sometimes. Having set up a midi file, and borrowing an laptop with a midi interface, I went to a piano shop that generously let me record their disklavier. The piece sounded fine until the crashing climax when its fuse blew and I had to sheepishly go down the road to a handy electronics store.
That said, an acoustic instrument like a disklavier or midi-controlled pipe organ is a far better sound experience than the fully electronic equivalent.
I’m old enough to remember 16K of memory being described as “whopping”