Add this to the Internet of Things: imagine data recording scratching and scratch performances.

Technologists Jamie Wilkinson, Michael Auger, and Kyle McDonald propose a new way of storing scratch moves as data. They’re not just working in traditional ways, either: they’re hacking turntables and optical mice and cameras, and imagine not only recording performances, but having machines recreate scratching. (Robots!) And they want your help. Kyle writes:

i’m going to be leading a group at art hack day ( brooklyn, january 26th-28th www.arthackday.net/ ) about scratch markup
language, a tool for recording performances from turntablists.

this describes the general idea and who we’re
looking for. we need everyone from web designers/developers, to
hardware hackers, coders and musicians. if you’re interested, or know someone who is interested, contact me or join the google group groups.google.com/group/arthackday/

(We cover the awesomeness that is Graffiti Markup Language on Motion, which goes further to explaining why this sort of data storage can be powerful and enabling.)

All is described – rather bizarrely – in an image. (Can we have plain text, please? It is, at least, a pretty picture!)

The very word “robot” comes from a Czech author, Karel Čapek and his 1920 sci fi theater work R.U.R.. In terms that resonate today, class, economics, and freedom play into that narrative, as Čapek introduced not only a word but the modern concept of android.

So, it’s fitting that the Czech Republic would be the scene for an artist carrying on the author’s legacy. Inventor Stanley Povoda doesn’t just imagine robots; he builds them and makes them into a musical band. Repurposing refuse, the robotic creations have eyes for knobs, and play percussion and other instruments. These are liberated robots, making music, not the oppressed, soon-to-revolt robots in R.U.R.

And yes, speaking of the Czech Republic, this is another case in which the once-unknown technological innovation and exploits are making themselves heard (literally) outside the nation’s borders. See, previously, the story that inspired this tip:

Meet the Little-Known DIY Music Pioneer of the Czech Republic, Standa Filip

Thanks to sout-side for the heads-up!

More importantly: dancers. On stilts. Shooting sparks and flame. This guy is a hell of an inventor. (See video, top.) Watch the interview below, then read lots more on his work in this article:

Stanely Povoda & His Robot Band [vivelesrobots-education.dk; site also in Czech]

And while I wish there were more documentation (time to hop Easyjet, perhaps), there are some short clips from his Prague kitchen:

Also, some links to his tube theremin:

http://www.midi.cz
http://midi.cz/Comment.aspx?id=89045
http://midi.cz/Comment.aspx?id=90456
http://midi.cz/Comment.aspx?id=90472

Sydney-based duo Electrocado (Bill Day + Ryan Whare) have been busy making machines to make music – and banging things. In the video above, their inventive robotic percussionist, triggered via MIDI, plays tunes and rhythms. The CP1 (Creative Project 1) uses servos to control drum sticks (chopsticks, in fact) pivoting on rods, which can then strike metal, plastic, and drum skin surfaces. Playing a G# Minor scale on a xylophone along with drums, the robot responds here to MIDI patterns sent to it by Ableton Live.

You can read loads of commentary on the process of making it in a PDF paper:

“Aesthetic and Practical Applications for Robotics in Electronic Music: Further Development of CP1 MIDI Triggered Robot [all for the Bachelor of Audio at SAE Sydney]

These two aren’t just about building flashy hardware, though. They also have a full-length album debut out, with diverse, stuttering, danceable music. I like “psychedelic glitch trance electro” as the label; various other keywords could easily fit. (The opening track even recalls Akufen; keep listening for a gamut of other goodness.) Intricately composed, sometimes tending into tech-house, the record is as finely-tuned as the robotic machine.

I could ramble on, but it’s pay-what-you-like on Bandcamp, so have a listen:

The Hass Effect | http://electrocado.bandcamp.com/

We’re also treated to the delightfully-named track “The Lugubrious Frog,” complete with some froggy drawing timelapse. Artists, too contribute to the project.

Yet more music, in the form of earlier EPs:

Thanks to Bill for sending this along; you’ll find his site worth a look, as well:
http://www.mrbillstunes.com/

Brilliant work, mates. We’ll be watching.

If you have any questions about their work, ask them here and perhaps we can do a follow-up interview.

We focus primarily on new machines and technology that make music directly, but of course, these tools make instruments that make music, too. Having seen an image of a guitar string vibrating from German firm Plek A+D Gitarrentechnologie earlier this week, reader Brian Turley observes that the work that company is doing is impressive.

We’re not necessarily talking mass-manufactured, machine-made guitars, either. The device in this case augments more traditional techniques, and can be put in the hands of an expert luthier. Plek’s technique scans guitar necks in multiple dimensions, creates a virtual fretboard in which you can adjust frets, then cuts some combination of frets, nut, and saddle for the desired result. The upshot of all of this: if the frets are adjusted precisely, it’s easier to play notes and string action is least likely to impede intonation. (It plays better and sounds better, done right.)

Here’s a bit on the technique:

The computer ascertains a 3-D like graph of the fretboard surface, including the position and height of the strings. Thanks to the plek scan the relief of the neck created by the string tension is taken into account while calculating the process parameters.

In the Virtual Fret Dress menu the operator can not only determine how much needs to be cut off from each fret but can also set the fretboard radius and amount of fall-off suited for the instrument or player. You can see the height of each fret, how high each fret will be after processing as well as where fretboard buzz occurs because of frets being too high or too low.

More information:
Plek: Technology

Guitar makers and repair shops then buy these machines for their own use; it’s just one tool in a larger toolchain, and it needs a very skilled operator. Humans, therefore, are no less a part of the equation.

I’m of course way out of my depth here; I think the last time I made a guitar it involved rubber bands and a cardboard box in school. But I’d be fascinated to hear from someone working with these machines. And even for us lay people, it’s a small but fascinating window into the sorts of tools now available to luthiers.

In a responsive, real-time sculpture, the simple sonic qualities of a rainstick become electronically enhanced. Rainlith, a “kinetic sound art” work by Rui Gato, makes the rainstick itself robotic, its sounds transformed in space in a way that is itself sculptural. Responding to movement in the space using Microsoft’s Kinect, the apparatus is a geektastic brew of just about every tool you could imagine involved in this sort of construction.

The artist shares full details, reproduced here in both English and Portugese – and Rui, thanks for sending this in:

Rainlith 2 – Kinectic sound art piece.

On Rainlith, the primitive naturally granular sound of a big rainstick gets explored in real-time by cyber-age sound manipulation tools.
It’s an interactive piece in witch the movement of the audience’s body activates an electric motor, making a reflex movement on the structure that embraces the instrument.
The sound of the rainstick is captured and processed in realtime, and sent 24 meters above, filling the empty space of a old industrial cereal container. The reverberated acoustic mix is then received back by the audience in the spot right below the opening of the container.

Na peça Rainlith o som primitivo, naturalmente granular, de um pau de chuva é explorado por ferramentas modernas de sound design, em tempo real.
É uma peça interactiva em que o movimento do corpo do público activa um motor eléctrico, provocando um movimento reflexo na estrutura que sustenta o instrumento.
O som captado em tempo real é processado e enviado 24 metros acima, enchendo o espaço de um silo de cereais industrial. A mistura acústica reverberada é absorvida pelo visitante no local imediatamente abaixo da abertura do silo.

hardware:

microsoft kinect
arduino duemilanove
H-bridge (hand made)
24v 6A DC motor
CPU
zoom H4N
FM emitter / receiver
ion ipa3 portable speaker

software:

MAX/MSP
Max for Live
OSCeleton
OpenNI
Nite
toxiclibs

agradecimentos especiais:

Nicola Henriques
Susana Luiz
Luís Pereira
Paulo Carocinho
André Sier
Daniel Coimbra
Ruben Santos

By the way, if you’re intrigued by the potential of Kinect, be sure to read sister site Create Digital Motion for more. Just today, we have news of a new version of EyesWeb that could be relevant to musical use:
EyesWeb, Powerful Computer Vision Software for Windows, Adds Kinect Support, Fixes, More

The first law of musical robotics: rock hard.

We’ve seen plenty of robotic musical experiments, but finding a robot that can seriously shred is another matter altogether. Meet the robotic string instrument, Poly-tangent, Automatic (multi-) Monochord – let’s just call her PAM. Built by Expressive Machines Musical Instruments, a group of University of Virginia PhD students and composers, PAM is capable of creating raucous musical performances like the one above, by composer and EMMI member Steven Kemper.

Musical robotics is cool, but it also hasn’t evolved much technologically in fifty years. It’s gotten cheaper and more accessible, but the fundamental design hasn’t changed – and that accessibility hasn’t translated into widespread use.

Now, the EMMI crew, in anticipation of a residency at Amsterdam’s famed STEIM research center, are hoping to take robotic music to the next level. MARIE is a project to put robotic music in a form that you can easily take on the road. They want to make the project open, so others can benefit, complete with schematics and code.

There are several aspects that make the MARIE project special beyond just road-ready design. The new instruments are intended to be more modular and controllable, to make the robotics as flexible as classic MIDI and analog modular gear has been. They also benefit from acoustic sound creation, controlling columns of air and physical strings instead of just digital or electrical models as on synths.

To fund their vision, the EMMI crew have started a Kickstarter project. You get something in return from your investment, including even training on robotics and good, old-fashioned instruments like the sax and bassoon. (That should put to rest any fears that these guys want a robot-only musical future.) Here’s how they describe their work:

MARIE are a set of virtuosic and expressive music robots that are portable, reliable, user-friendly, and fit within the dimension/weight limits for international checked baggage. In other words, these are music robots for touring musicians. The hope of EMMI and the EAR Duo is that the usability and portability of MARIE and similar music robots will finally push this powerful technology out of research labs and onto stages around the world. Within this aim, the entire project will be publicly documented online and the source code and hardware diagrams all provided as public knowledge for other enterprising musicians and technicians to construct similar robots.

EMMI-ers, I hope you keep CDM posted as you go. It looks like a very worthy project indeed.

Fundraiser for MARIE, open music robots for touring musicians [STEIMblog]

Expressive Machines

MARIE: a virtuosic band of robots made by and for musicians [Kickstarter]

Shimon, an adaptive, improvisational, percussion-playing robot, is getting smarter – and more famous, with appearances in places like the Stephen Colbert show. Now, humans have been known to get a big head under such circumstances. Shimon’s head has gotten “more social” – gestural intelligence helps the robot relate to fellow players and nod its head in time to the music.

I got a chance to talk more to project creator Dr. Gil Weinberg, director of the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology. He’s also taken some of this technology and built it into mobile app ZOOZBeat which you can spot in one of the videos here alongside the (much more expensive, no you can’t have one) robot.

What might surprise you about the Shimon project is that it isn’t just about copying what humans can do with a robot. In fact, if anything, says its creator, it’s about human-robotic relations. “The project was always aimed at creating new and inspiring interactions between humans and robots, with the goals of creating new and exciting musical outcome that cannot be created otherwise,” says Weinberg. He emphasizes that, while the robot assimilates human listening, it has a musical style all its own.

And yes, if there’s any doubt that Georgia Tech students can kick our ass in smarts and drum chops, even the ones who aren’t advanced robots, that’s Caity in the new promo video at top, an architecture major with LEED certification and drum line experience right up to the pros (having drummed for the Atlanta Falcons). That’s their fight song at the end. In fact, the only thing Georgia Tech students can’t do, evidently, is sing. (Though, based on my undergrad alma mater, I really, really, really can’t make fun.)

Shimon on Colbert from Georgia Tech on Vimeo.

Talking Machine Music

CDM: You talk in the NPR interview about not wanting the robot to play just like a human. So, I wonder – would you think of the robot as an expression of the musical taste and instincts of its designers? In some ways, it does sound different from a human; could we think of Shimon as having its own style, or being interesting because of its non-humanness?

Weinberg: Our motto is “listen like a human, play like a machine”. The idea behind it is that in order to connect with humans, Shimon has to understand music the way we humans do. For this purpose we developed perceptual modules based on music perception research for concepts such as tension and release, stability, similarly, etc. When Shimons responds, however, we want him to be surprising and inspiring, introducing new ideas that humans are not likely to use, whether by using mathematical processes that humans cannot process in real time or just through mechanical abilities. For this purpose we developed algorithms that utilize concepts such as genetic algorithms, fractals, morphing of HMM-based improvisation, etc. So for example, Shimon can respond by morphing the styles of Monk, Coltrane and his human co-player, in a way that humans probably will never use. In that sense he has its own musical style. For each different piece, though, Shimon may have a different style or “taste” based on the algorithm we use. I assume that one could say that his “taste” is a combination of all of his styles, which are inspired by the designers’ input.

How has the robot’s algorithm evolved since we first talked about it? What sorts of modifications have you found useful?

An important recent addition to the project is Shimon’s social head, developed with the help of my former post doc – Guy Hoffman. In order to create the connection with humans, we explored ideas of embodiment and gestures, as instrumental aspects of expressive musical group play. Currently Shimon can detect to the beat and nod his head accordingly, which helps humans get into the groove. He would look at what he finds interesting (if one player is playing something different than before, or different than the other players, Shimon would look at her rather than the other players). If Shimon plays something sophisticated, he is more likely to look at his own arms etc. We are also working on anticipating and coordination. We installed a camera in his head, and are currently working on letting Shimon use the visual input to anticipate and coordinate his playing with humans, along with the auditory information it currently processes.

Did the Colbert Bump go to Shimon’s head?

First Shimon was somewhat insulted, for himself and for the idiom of Jazz in general. Then he realized that they spelled his name correctly, so he started bragging about it. He also started to play in other styles to distance himself from the genre

But seriously, I am wiring a new piece for Shimon in an African Marimba Band Play style, which will help show its versatility in genres. (And here is an old clip where he plays an Indian Raga.)

Any other work we should know about, or other research growing out of the Shimon project?

To validate the importance of visual cues in music group play (i.e, validating the importance of Shimon’s embodiment and physically of the robot in comparison to interacting with computer generated music) we conducted this research: Visual Cues:
The Effect of the Visual Modality on Musical Ensemble Synchronization

Also, check out this paper, which won the Best Cognitive Paper in ICRA 2010. [That's the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, for those of you not in the know. And IEEE originated as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Whew. -Ed.]
“Gesture-Based Human-Robot Jazz Improvisation” by Guy Hoffman and Gil Weinberg [PDF link]

Shimon in Videos

Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology

dromama from Altitude Sickness on Vimeo.

Wherever you are in the world, here’s some geeky inspiration to kick off this summer weekend. And if you’re in the Los Angeles area, you should absolutely, positively be on Venice Boulevard tonight at 8pm at hacker venue CRASH Space for Handmade Music, gone LA.

In the lineup: circuit bent toys, robotic guitars, MakerBots, monomes, and microcontroller synths, with Altitude Sickness, Ian Hattwick, The Sweaty Caps, Theron Trowbridge, and Vince Wong.

It’s free at 8 pm, but if you can donate the recommended $10, you can help CRASH Space become a not-for-profit.

Full details at handmademusic.noisepages

Here’s a look at what these crazy California kids are up to. At top, Altitude Sickness is known for his Tupperware-housed creations. Check the Vimeo page for that video to grab MIDI remote scripts for Ableton Live plus Max patches for nanoKONTROL, monome, and more. Inspired by a previous post here on CDM, he assembled a bunch of custom controls for live performance and then uploaded the results for anyone to enjoy. But Altitude Sickness isn’t the only guest star tonight…

The Makerbot, the homebrewed, open source, 3D fabrication / CNC product, has been making music for some time. Above: a stirring rendition of “Still Alive” by Jonathan Coulton. But Crash SPACE have not one, but three Makerbots, leading to the first (that I know of) Makerbot ensemble. And they’ve got some extra MIDI code running between them.

Result: extra polyphony.

Lastly, Ian Hattwick’s Guitamaton, inspired by African rhythmic modality, turns the guitar into a robotically-controlled percussion instrument. Ian describes it thusly:

Guitamaton is a computer controlled musical instrument which explores the percussive and resonant qualities of the acoustic guitar. It melds the precision of microprocessor control with the unpredictability of vibrating metal and wood, and brings an added level of embodiment to computer based music by placing the sound creation process firmly in the physical world.

Enjoy these videos and links, and anyone who is in LA and makes it, be sure to send us any documentation you capture. (I’ll be in NYC, perhaps watching your Dodgers play the Yankees.)

Updated: There’s also the Xylovan, which is exactly as awesome as it sounds. California, always innovating in the vehicle department.

Facebook event page/RSVP

Robots may not yet surpass the piano-playing skills of master musicians, but they can at least blow a few piano students out of the water. And the latest musical robots aren’t priceless models out of big corporate R&D departments. They’re hacked together from off-the-shelf toys, use cheap parts, and are assembled with instructions you can grab free off the Internet. Now, what was that about the age of DIY being dead again? (Sorry, Radio Shack; maybe it just moved to Toys ‘R Us.)

Behold a programmable robot made of K’nex interchangeable toys. Recently featured on the how-to site Instructables, this robot can play simple musical sequences. Toys, as always, make for great rapid prototyping: this project makes use of an intelligent base unit and a system of interchangeable building blocks that make the design both easy to build and easy for others to replicate. It’s proof positive that while the digital age may tend to the virtual, mechanical invention still has plenty of room. And, hey, if this seems too advanced, there’s always the K’nex music stand project.

Programmable Knex Piano-Playing Robot – More DIY How To Projects

One more video follows below. And yes, the ‘bot can play Heart and Soul, even if it has neither. Congratulations to New York-based plysaxaphone on the work.

Ed.: From modern electronica to South Asian Classical music, machines to humans, the Machine Orchestra is doing fascinating things with electrically-powered, digitally-manipulated, physically-robotic music. Here’s more about what makes the ensemble tick.

It’s been nearly three months since I had the opportunity to guest blog here on CDM about a project I am involved in called the Machine Orchestra. In Pt. 1 you were introduced to the directors behind the ensemble, Dr. Ajay Kapur and Michael Darling. Today however, we look at the Machine Orchestra from the inside out, and explore a few of the interfaces, artists, and technologies that make the show a reality.

From the very beginning, a primary goal of the Machine Orchestra has been to explore novel human-machine interaction; how could we both exploit the strengths of our computers and robotic-musicians (i.e., taking advantage of extremely accurate metronomic precision), and at the same time, perform with a high level of musical expression? As we attempted to answer these questions, we made several discoveries that helped us fulfill our desire to musically interact with both our robotic counterparts and our computers.

KarmetiK Machine Orchestra Live at REDCAT from KarmetiK on Vimeo.

The video above gives you a glimpse of the evening which, to throw names around loosely, combined musical elements ranging from Glitch to IDM, traditional North Indian Classical to Balinese Gamelan, and post-rock to new music. Oh yah, let’s not forget the human-interacting machines!

The Speakers.

In addition to exploring new ways to interact with our machines, and taking inspiration from the laptop ensembles that had preceded us, we spent a great deal of time researching ways to reproduce our electronic sounds on stage, as well as experimenting with mains sound reinforcement. At every point in the show we tried to communicate a strong connection between the individual musicians themselves, and the sounds they were creating. To achieve this, each musician had a hemispherical speaker system, and/or a big-ass JBL sub-reinforcement for those musicians requiring extended low-frequency response. Additionally, a 5.1 mains mix was used to reinforce each musician’s location on stage and provide a cohesive house mix for the audience.

The Interfaces.

The diversity of the Machine Orchestra allowed for many types of novel physical interaction. The Machine Orchestra included the following custom interfaces and instruments: Arduinome, the SqueezeVox, ESitar (sitar hyper-instrument), MLGI (laser controller), Helio (touch-strip controller), EDilruba (Dilruba hyper-instrument), and the DigitalDoo. These interfaces were used to control software instruments on each musician’s computer, and also to remotely control the three robots via an OSC/MIDI network designed specifically for the Orchestra.

Interaction and Sync

During our work with the musical robots, interesting challenges emerged that called for creative use of our controllers and technology. One of the most difficult challenges we faced was maintaining stable “sync” between musicians, computers, and the robots. As we’ve briefly discussed in other articles/threads here on CDM, and recently at the CDM mediated NAMM After-Hours Party panel discussion, stable sync between machines is an extremely complex issue, both in terms of technological implementation and its actual uses. When controlling multiple mechanical instruments on stage, and communicating between ten electronic musicians, clock is much more than a way to make up for inaccurate timing—it serves as the essential foundation for fast and accurate communication between robots and performers. We needed to develop a system that allowed complex midi routing over a network, clock sync to be sent to all performers so that tempo changes could be dynamic and on the fly, and the ability for performers to exit or enter the sync stream at any time. We came up with the following solution.

In the Machine Orchestra, all electronic musicians (clients) receive sync from a hub/switch connected to a dedicated server machine via ethernet. The server runs a custom application we developed in ChucK, building off the framework developed for PlorK. Our additions implement a few extra features for interfacing with the robots, as well as addressing some of our stability concerns e.g., in case a musician losses sync the middle of the performance.

We discovered that ChucK implements midi using the RTMidi library, which by default disables midi clock. To enable midi sync in ChucK, the server and client applications are bundled with a custom ChucK binary that is compiled with MidiClock enabled. Additionally, a midi sync client application should configure itself automatically (assigning IP address…etc) and connect to the midi server; in order to facilitate this, we wrote a custom script to dynamically resolve a local IP for the client ChucK applications. Finally, one musician is set as the Master clock, sending clock to the server, and all other clients are then slave to this clock.

Typically, if a computer loses sync, the master clock will need to stop and restart in order to transmit the initial MidiClock start byte and allow that machine back into the sync stream. In practice, this would mean that each time a musician or instrument dropped (or exited) sync all musicians would have to be stopped and restarted by the master clock to get the one machine back in sync. Because of the number of musicians and robots receiving clock during the show, this simply was not an acceptable solution. Instead, we implemented a keyboard command (‘G’ for “Go!”) that each client could manually press if they lost sync. Although not a very complicated solution (simply forcing a stop and start message from the client), it was very effective in allowing a performer to jump back into the sync stream.

With stable sync, and clock communication between all musicians and machines, we were finally ready to explore the different ways to use our custom controllers.

In the piece Voices, various controllers were used to explore vocal synthesis techniques and granular control of vocal sounds. Meason Wiley used his Multi-Laser Gestural Controller (MLGI) to drive a custom Reaktor ensemble with in-air gestures, while Jim Murphy used his new touch-sensor based (akin to a vertical controlled Stribe) controller, the Helio, to control a custom Reaktor granular synthesis instrument he developed with Charlie Burgin. Similarly, Ajay Kapur controlled a granular ChucK patch using his ESitar’s extensive array of sensors (triple-axis accelerometers, thumb-pressure sensors, and fret sensors). Interestingly, each interface’s design imposed a very different use of the granular patch that Charlie, Jim and Ajay were all using—resulting in dramatically different effects.

Other (personal) highlights included being able to work with the visionary electronic and interface pioneers Perry Cook and Curtis Bahn. The vast assortment of interfaces (SqueezeVox, DigitalDoo, EDilruba…etc) and experience they brought to the show was invaluable. In Voices, Perry used the SqueezeVox to control synthesis models (written in ChucK) via an assortment of controls including: tilt/acceleration sensors, replacing the reeds of an accordion with air pressure sensors, force sensors, and linear/rotary potentiometers, creating Forty-One Buttons of pure vocal synthesizing chaos. Throughout the performance, Curtis’ use of the EDilruba beautifully translated human gesture into musical control via accelerometers and pressure sensors on the instrument and bow.

Due to its strength as a reconfigurable device, the Arduinome proved to be a particularly well-suited interface for the Machine Orchestra. One of the ways we used our Arduinomes, for a robot-centric piece called Mechanique, was by setting up 64 midi clips in Ableton, and then midi-learning them to individual buttons on our Arduinomes (we midi-mapped our Arduinomes using a Reaktor patch we made called nomeState). Each midi clip was scored with various sequences/patterns, complete with velocities. Additionally, each clip was paired with midi-clips sending back to ArduinomeSerial for visual light animations on the Arduinomes. Columns on the Arduinomes represented patterns designated for individual arms and beaters of the three robots. By combining different patterns, it was possible to play the robotic instruments in real time, from simple one-shot triggers to complex synced patterns. Completely human controlled, the robots could accurately respond with extremely difficult and complex rhythms, while the clock provided them with fine synchronized precision. The robots not only provided traditional drum sounds, but also effects which would be extremely hard for even the best human musicians to achieve e.g., extremely tight (and fast!) rolls, polyrhythm, and syncopation.

The Arduinomes were also used in many other ways. For example, mapping out the buttons to Ableton’s Midi Note Scale effect, and using the Arduinome as a pitch-based controller for playing soft-synths live; the matrix layout allowed for interesting cross relationships between the intervallic layouts of the different scales.

Each piece in the show called for extremely different methods of interaction between musician and machine. It would be impossible for me to detail every way the instruments were used to control the musical robotics live, as well as all the various software e.g., Ableton, ChucK, Reaktor, and MaxMSP. We would however, like to use this opportunity to open up discussion on the future of laptop ensembles, and promote the sharing of ideas that have been gained when performing with other laptop musicians, interfaces, and/or musical robotics. We graciously thank everyone who came out to support the Machine Orchestra, making it a sell-out debut, as well as those who shared links and spread-the word via twitter, facebook, email, and word of mouth. For those of you who were unable to make it out, no fear, the Machine will come to you soon!

The KarmetiK Machine Orchestra is:
Music Director, Co-Creator: Ajay Kapur
Production Director, Co-Creator: Michael Darling
Guest Electronic Artists: Curtis Bahn & Perry Cook
World Music Performers: Ustad Aashish Khan, Pak Djoko Walujo, & I Nyoman Wenten
Multimedia Performer-Composers: Charlie Burgin, Dimitri Diakopoulos, Jordan Hochenbaum, Jim Murphy, Owen Vallis, Meason Wiley, and Tyler Yamin
Visual Design: Jeremiah Thies
Lighting Design: Tiffany Williams
Dancers: Raakhi Sinha, Kieran Heralall
Sound Design: John Baffa
Production: Lauren Pratt