Digital music is extending more deeply into the physical world, thanks to sensors and robotics. The result: gorgeous acoustic sounds as part of the lexicon. When we last spotted Simon Kirby and the Found Electronics collective, they were taking the tangible interface out of electronic music and applying them to ambient sampled sounds out in the woods. Now, they’re talking to plants and channeling traditional Chinese instruments.

Found Electronics: Three Pieces Project Page

Simon writes with some of the details:

It’s called "Three Pieces", and it’s our attempt to create an interactive musical installation that is in keeping with the natural environment of the beautifully restored Victorian Palm House. Rather than use computers and a PA, we decided to try and build something completely acoustic. In the end, we’ve got a traditional Chinese dulcimer and 12 chimes spread throughout the plants and foliage of the Palm House. The instruments are played robotically, controlled by two Arduinos. Motion detectors and a soil sensor allow us to react to people in the space and to the state of the plants to remix the music we’ve composed especially for the installation. The result is a strange combination of traditional and modern, organic and electronic, nature and artifice. Despite being composed in advance, the music will never be exactly the same twice, in part because it will change in response to the environment and audience, and also because the robots are a combination of accurately machined parts (e.g. mechanical solenoids) and natural materials (e.g. bamboo canes).

The installation will be open from Saturday [June] 14th for two weeks. On Saturday 21st, there will be a performance in the Palm House by the band Found for midsummer’s day, and we are planning a Q&A session for the public sometime in the two weeks, to be announced on our website: www.foundelectronics.net

You might also be interested in the other work we’re doing, also on www.foundelectronics.net. For example, we’ve been developing a purpose-built combination of audio-looper software and controller, which is quite fun…

The “mood” of the musical robots is actually affected by the plants:

The moisture content of the soil changes slowly as the plants absorb water, while on a much faster timescale, the temperature changes in the building as animals, including humans, move about. The installation detects this living presence in the Palm House and the music changes accordingly. The robots react to humans, but their mood alters with the plants.

The show has been extended through July 13, so if you’re near the Royal Botanic Garden, you can go have a look!

Perhaps fueled by YouTube comepetition, robotic instruments are looking more and more impressive. What I’d most like to see: a robotic battle of the bands. The latest creation comes to us from the all-robot band The Trons, based in New Zealand. They have cute names, and I bet the ‘bots are more fun to date than some, ahem, real drummers my friends have gotten involved with…

The crew:

Ham (vox and rhythm guitar), Wiggy (single string lead guitar), Swamp (drums), Fifi (keyboards, one hand working!)

Hmmm, basically true of my keyboard playing, as well. And here’s their blurb:

The Trons are a completely self playing robotic junk band! They are made mostly from old computer and mechanical parts and play original songs using an array of old amps and instruments. They now have five gigs under their belt and have just completed Hamilton’s Ignition Fringe Festival.

They even did an “interview” in NZ (speaking as a sometimes-music journalist, there are times when you might prefer to speak to robots):

MM: How did you get together and what made you want to start a band?
TT: This old photocopy card vender machine turned up and was going to the dump. And there was this pile of meccano and an old guitar. We just put three and three together.

Who are some of your inspirations? Do you look up to some of the pioneers of electronic music, such as the Juno 6 or the Commodore 64?
Definitely the ZX81. Clive Sinclair and 1K of RAM! You gotta have limitations to make good music. We can’t keep away from 3D Monster Maze too.

Hamilton, NZ’s Mammoth Live Events Guide Interviews The Trons
http://www.myspace.com/thtrons

Thanks to NZ’s Frank “flunki” for the tip!

Previous robotic musicians on CDM:
Yellow Drum Machine Robot Creator: You, Too, Can Make Your Own Robots
Robot Drum Machine Roams, Samples, Bangs On Stuff
Video: Robotic Theremins, Ready To Replace a Human Near You
Robots Can Be Friendly, Groovin’: Max-Powered Keepon and Beatbots
Robot Drummers, Compared: Like Musicians, Robots are Better When They Listen
Robot Drummer Responds to Human Playing; How They Did It

If music technology has ever made you dream of autonomous musical robots, crawling around the floor making sound like a Juilliard of mechanical insect prodigies, I’ve got great news for you.

While we’re on the subject of DIY electronics, here are some words of encouragement: the designer who made that fantastic drum machine robot making the rounds on the Web says he’s got a day job, and you, too, can do what he did.

Yes, you.

First, check out the autonomous, banging-on-stuff and sampling drummer robot pictured above, if you haven’t seen it yet:

Robot Drum Machine Roams, Samples, Bangs On Stuff

Creator Frits Lyneborg (aka fristl) writes CDM (after hurdling our spam filters — sorry about that):

Hi there – Yes I am out there, and next to me is some sticks & wires & some yellow belt tracks :D

Thanks for all the street-credit etc, thank you so very much. I hope my next robot / next weekend can live up to this, lol!

I am CEO of bee3.com – consider this brilliant company next time you want a website. Well – what else to do with my 15 minutes of fame, if not an ad for my company ;)

Anyway – it is very easy to make these robots, seriously; I do not have much of a clue, I just have plenty of glue. Hey – what a little fame can bring up in you, rhyming now, so muzical :)

i have made a walk through on how to make a quite capable robot, that uses all the same basics, and it only takes 2 hours once you got the parts send by mail.. letsmakerobots.com

Trust me; it is fun and easy to build robots!

Still skeptical? Here’s an even simpler design:

How to build your first robot

That’s too big? Too heavy? Too complicated? You’re too broke to spend US$85? This robot is even simpler and costs just $40 in parts (some of which you may have already):

Little 8

It’s the cute little bot below. And talk about simple: it’s like a battery with wheels.

Neither of these designs is specifically musical, but that might actually be ideal for starting a musical project, since they’re so simple. I also start what you could do with a swarm of these and some internal synth chips. That’s something evidently other people have been thinking of, but with more sophisticated hardware — I’d prefer to do it with something cheap. Stay tuned.

This has been making the blog-o-rounds, but if you haven’t seen it, the Yellow Drum Machine is a brilliant musical robot — brilliantly musical, and brilliantly simply technologically. (There’s something to be said for elegant design.) It rolls around, looks for objects nearby, bangs on them, and samples that sound. (Hmm, it’s like a little robotic equivalent of me around my apartment.) As seen on MAKE.

The specs are terrific:

• Cost to build: $120
• Time to build: 20 hours
• Actuators / output devices: 6 geared motors in total, 2 speakers, sound sampler
• Control method: autonomous (very)
• CPU: Picaxe 28
• Operating system: Picaxe basic
• Power source: 4 AA batteries
• Programming language: Picaxe basic
• Sensors / input devices: SRF05, microphone
• Target environment: where ever there is something to play on

By “fritsl” — fritsl, if you’re out there (or anyone else), want to let us in on who you are?

Previously:

Robots on CDM

Robot Drummers, Compared: Like Musicians, Robots are Better When They Listen

Robot Drummer Responds to Human Playing; How They Did It (speaking of which, Gil and company at Georgia Tech, perhaps it’s time for a Haile Mobile?)

Got something cool like this and can get to San Francisco in April? I hope you’re entering our competition!

Sarah Angliss, a human Thereminist in the UK, sends us this video of a creepy doll robot playing the Theremin. (If you’re prone to the jeebilies, you may not want to watch. Sarah writes, “I’ve posted my latest jam with Clara 2.0, the theremin playing robot doll, on YouTube. Hope you enjoy watching her talents (or lack of them).” (Technical details after the jump.)

Our friend Ranjit promises this week he’ll bring his Theremin-playing bots to Handmade Music, so if you’re in the NYC area and free this Thursday, you can meet them in person. If not, here they are on YouTube playing “Crazy”. Ranjit describes thusly:

ROBOT BAND! LEV the thereminbot and his newly-built pal thumpbot play “Crazy” with help from a 20-year-old MT32 synthesizer. OK, Lev’s a bit out of tune, but hey, ROBOTS. A tribute to The Ether & Aether Experiment’s marvelous performance.

I don’t know. I’m nervous. I think we’d better whip up some Theremin Laws of Robotics quickly. (Wait — on second thought, those conflicting laws don’t work out very well, do they?)

More technical details on how Sarah pulled off her creeptacularly brilliant robo-Thereminist:

First, from YouTube:

Named in honour of the original theremin virtuoso Clara Rockmore, Clara 2.0 is a robot doll who can play the theremin live. I call her the ‘polite robot thereminist’ as she listens to a line from another player and moves her dolly arm to get her own theremin in perfect tune. Well, that’s the theory…

In this jamming session, Clara 2.0 is copying a line from an old Roland SH-2 synth (which I play silently), then the line from my own theremin. When the two theremins play together, it gets quite chaotic as Clara tries to follow me – and I try to lock into Clara’s line.

As Clara 2.0 is continually monitoring a live sound and adjusting her tuning (no midi here), her technique has the fluid pitch of a human player. Everything on this recording – apart from the drum track – is played live. There is no manipulation of the recorded sound, apart from multitracking and a little reverb after the event. The keyboard instrument at the beginning is a cheapy toy, called an Angel Organ – I hope you can forgive its cranky tuning. The final theremin melody has been treated, live, with an old-school vocal flanger.

Clara is under continual development – she has quite a way to go before she can claim the talents of Lev (a great robot player). Keen-eyed observers may have noticed the wobbily thread of wire on the end of Clara’s egg whisk. This gives her some Rockmoresque vibrato.

I do attempt to incorporate Clara 2.0 into my stage act although she can be temperamental. Recently, I’ve been trying to improve her earthing and capacitance so she can be set up swiftly and can work more reliably ‘out of the box’.

Thanks to everyone at Dorkbot London and the Hands off Festival, 2007, for their encouragement and useful tips. In particular, I’d like to thank theremin maker Jake Rothman for his extremely useful electrical advice (Clara’s insides are now lined with silver foil) and Gordon Charlton, whose virtuosic egg whisk numbers inspired Clara’s current look. Thanks also to Emmet Spier for screwing her arms on better, Mike Blow for suggesting I try out this classic tune and Colin Uttley for playing the bass riff. Apologies to the great Roy Budd, composer of the jaw-droppingly gorgeous Get Carter theme.

Sarah Angliss
Spacedog UK
www.spacedog.biz

Technical how and why

I wanted some more technical details, so Sarah followed up with this explanation (thanks!):

I use pitch detection, plus classic old-school servo control, to make her work. Her theremin and mine (or my synth) are both connected to a Max/MSP patch running on a Mac. A phidget board interfaces her to the Mac. The patch is constantly measuring the error in her pitch. I use the error to control the velocity of her pitch arm servo – if the error is greater, it moves faster.
That’s why she’s constantly adjusting herself, as I play, to keep herself in tune. The very crude servo control gives her pitch a certain amount of portamento and overshoot that gives it that sloppy pitching that you get with a human player. I’ve added the little hairs of wire to the end of her egg whisk to give her some fine, Rockmoresque vibrato.

The biggest concerns were getting enough earthing and conducting area – I noticed Lev [Ranjit's 'bot] is made of metal which must be a huge help here.

Clara is earthed to my theremin and is packed with silver foil to make her a better conductor. She still needs a lot of work to improve her range and reliablility – but she’s just about good enough to get out of the box and play ‘live’ in my stage shows.

The Keepon is a cute, yellow robot that dances to music you may have seen bopping on YouTube. It shows how subtle changes could make robotics friendlier in the near future.

Foremost among those changes: show a little skin. By wrapping the robot’s armature with soft, rubber skin, the Keepon is both squeezable and more lifelike. (After all, how many people / pets / creature friends do you know who don’t have a skeleton and skin? Yes, you with the pet beetle, you’re an exception.)

Second, and earning the Keepon YouTube fame and glory, the BeatBots know how to shake their groove thing. Like smart puppeteers, the Keepon’s designers have kept motions simple but expressive: turning, nodding, rocking, and bobbing, the Keepon’s motions themselves are realistic, and convey attention. Those decisions were conceived to let the Keepon interact with children, but all people respond well to attention as emotional connection. Our friend Keith Lang of Plasq was recently musing on the importance of attention and eyes on his blog, as a way of contemplating software UI design. Looking into your eyes is powerful is the short version of that; big-eyed Anime characters, puppy dogs, and glaring looks from enemies all grow out of that.

Talking about it is one thing; here’s the robot in action with its creators, dancing to Spoon:

Of course, to make that work, the Keepon needs a good sense of rhythm — better than, say, that erratically flopping fish you got at the local convenience store as a gag gift. To do that, the Keepon’s creators are using music/multimedia software Max/MSP to prototype their “architecture for rhythmic social interaction.” It’s not the first time we’ve seen people programming robotic rhythmic interactions in Max: Georgian robot Haile drums in response to a human player using Max-programmed interactions.

Hey, you’re not listening any more, are you? You’re still watching that video over and over again. This is important! This is rhythmic social interaction! Though I guess if you are still distracted, the magic works.

Keepon on Tour: The Keepon has gigs in Denmark and Korea this week, followed by a set of LA appearances next month in association with Wired Magazine. They’ll even be doing a benefit concert for Creative Commons with Spoon. Details at the Keepon site:
Keepon & the Beatbots

Previously:
Robot Drummers, Compared: Like Musicians, Robots are Better When They Listen

The Motoman robots take up taiko drumming at a 400-year-old festival in Japan. An impressive display, but you may immediately notice they lack a certain … something. (That something is definitely not creepiness, for the robotophobic.

‘Motoman’ bot shows it’s got rhythm [Cnet Crave Blog]

What you won’t see here is anything truly live or interactive. For that, Georgia Tech trumps the Japanese engineers, with the robot Haile, which we first covered nearly two years ago. Haile is an interactive robot that listens to what a human drummer has played. Rather than simply echoing rhythms, Haile is able to intelligently “improvise” responses. The results may still be early in the evolution of musical robotics, but they go far beyond the example above. Here, robots are able to extend, rather than replace, human abilities; they embody the compositional ideas of the programmer, and engage the human player’s traditional musicianship.

In other words, like a good musician, a good robot listens and makes you play better.

Robot Drummer Responds to Human Playing; How They Did It

The New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) 2007 Conference, held at NYU’s campus, was an exciting and stimulating convergence of ideas and technology in the world of digital music. The conference’s umbrella “Interfaces for Musical Expression” brings together creatives from all over the artistic and engineering world: from music runtime software (MaxMSP, PureData, ChucK to), designers for alternate controller hardware (M-Audio, Making Things, i-cubeX, Photon Wind Research), and educators for music and electronic arts (Columbia Computer Music Center, Harvestworks, NYU’s TischITP) and art galleries/shops (LEMURplex, Eyebeam), just to name a few.

Held in Manhattan, and hosted as a part of the larger New York Electronic Arts Festival, the event moved at full-tilt New York Speed. The days were jam-packed. Paper presentations starting at 9am, break for live technology demos at 1 (and a chance to sneak away for lunch), a keynote presentation and more papers at 2 until 6, when the evening’s concerts and performances begin, where many people’s programs and hardware were showcased in a artistic context.

These concerts included a multimedia theater concert, held right across the street on NYU campus. On Friday and Saturday were late-night club-shows held at Brooklyn’s Southpaw venue and the Galapagos space. These jams went until well after midnight.

The keynote speakers joked that this dense conference schedule made NIME an “athletic event,” which is not so far from the truth. We arrived Thursday morning. I was unable to attend every event, but I did see the majority of the paper presentations, live demos, and keynotes. I caught one of two club shows, and saw the last of three theater concerts. The whole week was a lot to take in, and it’s only fair if I try to sum up my experience of this special conference by describing the things I remember best. So, among each of the categories of the presenters, products, and performances which I managed to catch, I’ll share some words and images.

Presenters

Percussion instruments using realtime convolution: Physical controllers
Roberto Aimi
Again, I’ll admit my bias toward high-tech drum sounds. Roberto used vibration sensors (piezos) to send signals to excitable drum sounds. However, he’s turned the conventions of e-drums on its ear. Rather than turning vibration peaks into midi notes to trigger sounds, the piezo is treated as a continuous signal, used to excite convolution models of drum sounds. In short, this means getting natural brush excitation and cymbal wash that is simply impossible with midi sound triggering.

I was too busy being mouth-agape to get any images of his work. However, Roberto has lots of demo vids on his own website. Also, this work is right on track Adam Tindales’ “hybrid percussion,” of which I managed to get a video. (See Adam’s work in Presenters.)

The T-Stick: from Musical Interface to Musical Instrument
Joseph Malloch, Marcelo Wanderley
In the world of digital sound control, the connection between physical controller and the sound algorithms it controls can be somewhat arbitrary. Perry Cook expounded on this in his keynote address, saying that one shouldn’t imitate existing instruments, because “the best violin controller is already a violin.”

Joseph Malloch’s T-stick, also called the Tiger stick because of its many bands of pressure sensors, stood out from a lot of the other hands-on devices that one plugs into their computer. This was a padded stick with sensors for vibration, movement, even positional pressure and twisting. Its most important asset was its ability to respond to positional damping. This meant it could be played like a fret-able string and a damp-able chime, and some things in-between. As a tactile and vibrational sensor, the utter simplicity (and cost-effectiveness) of its design was quite impressive.

T-Stick in action:

Trimpin: 2nd Keynote Presenter
The German-born, Seattle-based sculptor and musical installation artist was at NIME to provide the conference keynote on musical sculpture and mechanical instrumentation. The themes of the morning session revolved around the philosophical, historical, and pedagogical issues surrounding new musical interfaces. Trimpin was alive and creating instrument-art well before the age of digital. His body of work often reflects many unorthodox adaptations of many of the foundations of “digital music” which many of us take for granted. For example, when he needed a sculpture-based random number generator for a musical device, he constructed an array of bobbing-birds to generate random streams of data.

Trimpin keynote, pt. I:

Trimpin keynote, pt. II [description from YouTube]:

he’s describing a sound/art installation he did. In it, an array of bobbing chickens created a random-number generator that would randomly select which of many records got played.

A man of great insight and humor, Trimpin’s art and ideas are a valuable link to the era of pre-digital machine-music.

Products and Demos

Multi-form Wind Instrument Controller
Photon Wind Resarch, Ltd.
Conference partner Photon Wind Research was showing off a really slick hardware controller package for wind, brass, and harmonica players. With its multiple embouchure-sensing mouthpiece, its array of pressure and distance sensors, and valve attachments, this unit seems to digitally interface just about anything you blow into. In the (hopefully) laptop-based near future of digital players, this unit could give MIDI saxes a run for their money. The hardware is small, looks tough, and has modular snap-in sensor modules (for sax or woodwind keys) and processor components (for wireless and other communication processing.)

Hybrid Method For Extended Percussive Effects
Adam R. Tindale
As a drummer, I have an admitted bias toward high-tech drum widgets. Adam’s table, with a piezo drum-trigger plugged into his laptop, immediately caught my eye. He explained to me that, rather than turning a trigger signal into discrete events, it could be harnessed as an expressive signal itself. As we talked, he told me to check out Roberto Aimi’s presentation later that day.

While Roberto’s work generates percussive sounds from convolving drum samples, Adam generated drum tones from resonance modeling: more “drum-synthesis” than sampling.

The hybrid digital drum in action:

Mobile Clavier: A New Music Keyboard for Flexible Key Transposition
Yoshinari Takegawa, Tsutomu Terada, Masahiko Tsukamoto
These gentlemen had given a paper presentation on their modified midi-keyboard on the first day of paper presentations. However, it wasn’t until they had their keyboard out for demo on Day 2 that I really understood how it worked. In a nutshell, the keyboard has extra black keys, and the orientation of the key scale can be reconfigured to fit the score as you play. So instead of having to lift your hands for chord changes, the keys transpose under your hands.

How does it work? They added extra black keys (in between E and F and B and C), and made these black keys light up according to the transposition, where some are “black keys” and some are “blank keys.” You use a foot-pedal to step through the transpositions, which are programmed as part of the score. You can use the 25-key controller to cover a significantly wider range of keys while barely moving your hands around.

Here’s a video demo:

Performances

It just isn’t “Musical Expression” without the performance aspect. I only caught a few of the concerts, and I enjoyed all. Among them:

Radio Wonderland
Joshua Fried, Friday Evening, club-concert at Southpaw
Friday Night, Southpaw bar and venue. This is the performance that many people were talking about. Josh literally kicked out improvised jams with computer, radio, steering wheel, and shoes. More specifically, he samples snippets of speech, melody or beats right off the radio from a boombox, loops them on the computer, using a MIDI-fied steering wheel for loop-editing, filter-sweeps, pitch-warping effects, and jams along by beating upon drum-trigger dress shoes. I hope some short videos help paint a better picture.

Radio Wonderland @ NIME, pt. I:

Pt. II:

Pt. III:

Pt. IV:

Desconcierto pt. 2
Gregory Kowalski, Andrea Pensado. Saturday Evening, theatre event
Compared to the some of the other multi-media performances of that and other nights, this performance was simple. Greg faced the main projection screen, wielding a flashlight at a camera, which fed data to Andrea, who processed the camera and her voice, back into mangled sounds and explosively colorful visuals. This provided an evocative and dynamic performance of painting with motion, and seeing and hearing the results. Between the grinding sounds and the explosive color animation, it was quite a violent, vandalistic piece.

A few seconds, as a sample:

I managed to capture only a few seconds on video. I had the delight of grabbing lunch with Greg and Andrea Sunday morning, on the way to LEMURplex, and I was surprised that the makers of such violent multi-media would have such a subdued sense of humor (…or perhaps, like me, they were just exhausted). I look forward to seeing more of them.

The LEMURbots
Built, showcased, and activated by Eric Singer at LEMURplex art space, Brooklyn
While not technically (human) presenter sin their own right, Eric Singer’s Leauge of Electronic Musical Urban Robots sure put on a show. It seems that all his robots are fed MIDI info from Max/MSP.

My favorite of Eric’s League is the Slime-a-tron. Here I am playing the slime, and getting Eric to divulge his secret formula. Ed.: We saw the Slime-a-tron at the CDM/Make night at Etsy Labs — see previous video and photos/report, especially if you like this sort of thing. -PK

And the GuitarBot. 4 guitar strings with computer-driven tangents. This contraption makes for some rather frantic glissando strumming.

Of course, Eric’s gallery ceiling was littered with the percussbots. Here they are, jamming out, along with his Xylobot:

See MVI 1987, 1988, 1991

Thanks, Patrick! We’re still welcoming other entries from the NIME conference — the thing was so huge that even this extensive report can’t begin to cover it — so if you’d like to share your own project, or one you saw, please do write us. -PK

Robosonic Eclectic: Morton Subotnik, They Might Be Giants, and robotic musical instruments on the same bill? That … doesn’t happen very often. But it does happen this weekend, starting tonight.

With a lineup that includes They Might Be Giants, JG Thirlwell, Mort Subotnick, George Lewis, R. Luke DuBois and J. Brendan Adamson, Lemurplex is kicking off what looks like a really packed couple of weeks of music and research into new instruments here in New York this weekend. Check out the TMBG video and JG Thirwell clip for a teaser of what’s to come. I’ll be there, so say hi if you, uh, know what I look like. (And thanks to all of you who’ve been saying hello at various events. It’s always great to know who’s out there reading.)

League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots

Lemurplex, incidentally, is a terrific place to go learn this stuff if you can find a way to come to New York — not only musical robotics, but music tech in general. See also Harvestworks, which regularly has people in from other lands around the world for residencies / learning / etc. Not everything happens in New York, of course; I hope to put together an up-to-date list of educational venues beyond academia around the globe soon.

Flyer after the jump.