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An engineer has built and programmed an all-robot band

guitarworld.com

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Re: An engineer has built and programmed an all-robot band

#31

Post by JoeAltmaier »

We had a player piano in my house as a kid. My Dad bought it from Shakey's Pizza when they remodeled. Along with a score of piano rolls.

I pumped through Under the Double Eagle march endlessly as a kid. What a thrill to hear all that music come out of a piano through my effort!

Maybe if this guy's music robot was pneumatic and required a kid to pump the compressor, then it'd provide that same thrill.

Re: An engineer has built and programmed an all-robot band

#32

Post by aliqot »

dmd wrote: post #30
not_the_fda wrote: post #28

Not really that new. An artist is Wisconsin made whole rooms of self playing instruments in the 60s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9HeaddNiqU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnXu6YNrJ7A

(And if you haven't been to The House on the Rock, it's honestly worth a trip to Wisconsin /just for it/.)

dont forget your walking shoes though, even as a young person my dogs were barking by the time I'd seen it all. At the time the infinity room was not blocked off but the last few feet and young me wanted to see the toothpick at the end

Re: An engineer has built and programmed an all-robot band

#33

Post by jumboshrimp »

IvyMike wrote: post #4
Sjeiti wrote: post #3

I expected the article to be about Compressorhead.

I expected the article to be about Showbiz Pizza.

There’s really only one analog worth mentioning in this thread about robots-cum-musicians.

https://youtu.be/Fd5c3Qtcr_w

Re: An engineer has built and programmed an all-robot band

#34

Post by zzzeek »

I clicked this link expecting to finally see a writeup on the amazing people who created Compressorhead and got... some instruments with automation attached to them. Which is great. But a headline like, "there's an All Robot Band!!!", that would be... Compressorhead. This is "engineer has added midi automation to live instruments" which is not novel by itself at all. There's 100 year old player pianos that have guitars and snare drums in them (which frankly sound better than this, hitting the hihat from below?! like this one I saw this summer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6sc9ULNA64) .

Re: An engineer has built and programmed an all-robot band

#35

Post by adenozine »

laboratorymice wrote: post #21

Somewhat related and also amazing: https://www.youtube.com/@animusic6837

I knew this would be in here somewhere. This definitely stirred something when I first saw it. If I hadn't already begun a career in computers, I'm certain this would've catalyzed it.

Re: An engineer has built and programmed an all-robot band

#36

Post by zzzeek »

dmd wrote: post #30
not_the_fda wrote: post #28

Not really that new. An artist is Wisconsin made whole rooms of self playing instruments in the 60s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9HeaddNiqU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnXu6YNrJ7A

(And if you haven't been to The House on the Rock, it's honestly worth a trip to Wisconsin /just for it/.)

the ratio of "how many people have any idea such a place exists" over "how amazing and vast the House on the Rock is" is unfathomably low. it's as mystifying as the place itself

Re: An engineer has built and programmed an all-robot band

#38

Post by 4b11b4 »

Why not listen to a recording at this point.. While it might be impressive, it's not interesting (to me).

The point of witnessing live music is to experience the hard work and character of a human with their instrument.

An entire band in sync together - witnessing this incites some emotion in me. Improvisation... this is exciting.

Re: An engineer has built and programmed an all-robot band

#39

Post by _spduchamp »

I'm working on a robotic drumming project, but rather than playing canned sequences, I'm experimenting with rhythm synthesis to create an intuitive and expressive instrument that anyone can play. This was a test of an early version with rhythm synthesis happening with oscillators in Puredata that trigger OSC hit instructions to the robot which is just an ESP8266 wired to a Vertiq smart motor. https://youtu.be/zeHJXyyhJ70

My model of rhythm in that version was extremely naive, so now I'm now trying to grok Godfried Toussaint's The Geometry of Musical Rhythm with the goal of moving the rhythm generation to the microcontroller. This is to have a toolset for making autonomous musical ensembles. I'm definitely having challenges figuring things out, so if anyone else is interested in this stuff, ping me and I'd love to share notes.

Re: An engineer has built and programmed an all-robot band

#40

Post by robomartin »

linkjuice4all wrote: post #13
robomartin wrote: post #6

Is “robot” overused these days? Headline: “Engineer builds robotic lawn care system” Reality: A programable sprinkler valve timer.

In this case these are more like machines that play instruments than what most “common folk” would consider a robot. This is certainly an interesting creation but for some reason the lack of sensors or some ability to respond to what it is doing or it’s environment seems to fall short of “robot”.

I have a 25 year old Yamaha electronic piano that can play itself using stored programs or controlled over MIDI.

Is it a robot?

They keys are not mechanically actuated when it auto-plays. Does that cause disqualification from the "robot" category?

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