Fight the (Tympanic) Power

A really awesome Kickstarter project ends in 5 days and is about $800 short of its funding goal. Here’s the description:

Expressive Machines Musical Instruments (EMMI) is comprised of Troy Rogers, Steven Kemper, and Scott Barton. Since 2007, the group has been designing, building, and composing music for robotic musical instruments on a shoestring budget. EAR Duo—Dana Jessen (bassoon) and Michael Straus (sax)—is an incredibly gifted, innovative, and engaging force in new music. The duo is ready to tap into the power and promise of EMMI’s musical robots. EAR Duo is commissioning EMMI to create an ensemble of next generation robotic string and wind instruments for a series of upcoming performances across the US and Europe.

EMMI has done some interesting work with robot-only performance, but this new band, MARIE, is going to be designed for performance with humans. If you’ve been following this blog (while I was still updating regularly…), you know I’m a fan of mechanical music and experiments with non-speaker-based “automatic” music performance. These are the kind of cool projects that will help feel out the boundaries of what it is possible to do with musical robotics.

As they write on the kickstarter page:

The current state of musical robotics resembles that of electronic music 50 years ago. Robotic instruments are poised to explode forth from research institutions onto the larger musical scene, creating new genres and transforming existing ones.

But, as in the era of modular synths created by people like Buchla and Moog, it’s going to take extraordinary machines—both in terms of design and sound—to instigate such a revolutionary transformation. It’s clear that these machines must be designed by musicians, for musicians.

I’ve pitched in already, and it would be a pity for an adventurous project like this to go unfunded, so please think about giving!