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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.
Since the player piano was invented in 1863, it's curious to be so interested in a robotic guitar in 2005. :)
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
q: How does a robot get to carnagie hall?
A: Assembly, assembly, assembly.
Following the concert, the robots met up and started a Styx cover band.
When you consider that Philip Glass studied at Juilliard for several years, this isn't really that surprising or far out for them. The robots' music was probably less repetitive and more soulful than Glass's compositions of the time ;-) one of which is described as:
"The player performs "1 + 1" by tapping the table top with his fingers or knuckles. Two rhythmic units, which build the block of "1 + 1", are combined in regular arithmetic progressions."
'At these times of special celebration a choir of over two million robots sing the company song "Share and Enjoy". Unfortunately - again - another of the computing errors for which the company is justly famous means that the robot's voices are exactly a flattened fifth out of tune and the result sounds something like this, only slightly worse.'
The performance would be the same. What is so great about 'self-playing organ'?
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
The best part about this GuitarBot thing is that if it totally malfunctions and bursts into flame while on stage, people will just think it's part of the act.
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.
I immediatly thought of this video
Technoli
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”
My grandad used to roll in from the pub, drunk as a *unt and fire up the old pianola so he could pretend to be playing the piano.. no doubt he'd be equally skillful with a robotic guitar..
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