Vibrations and how they get to your ears.
Noise for airports is a blog about culture, sound, music, and technology.
You can filter the posts to see just things I wrote or made.
Updated (sometimes) by Nick Seaver.
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!
For the weekend, some robot DJs.
This is a great profile of Eric Singer, of LEMUR, and his robotic and strange musical instruments. Machines that make music, who would have thought you’d find those here?
(via Synthtopia)
Rui Penha’s Robotic Gamelan is part of a “robotic percussion” roundup over at Create Digital Music. (yeah, I’m still catching up on blogs from the holidays, so what?)
The mallets are really gorgeous (are they typical gamelan equipment, just fastened to mechanical actuators? I’m not familiar enough with gamelan music to know). Also amazing are basically all the other robots in the roundup, so you should click over there.
(I reserve the right to plunder that roundup for future posts, because it is so awesome.)
(via Create Digital Music)
Robots! Watch a dapper robot man play the flute with his friend, a, um, shoe-shine bench that plays the saxophone?
(Clearly the hat is important for ideal flute-playing.)
You can read more or see another video, too.
(via John)
Robot that can play Rock Band on the iPhone.
As an anonymous Boing Boing commenter noted: “no robot can simulate all the grunting and sweating.”
Yup.
(via Boing Boing)
A robot that plays an electric organ. Couldn’t not blog this.
(Also, there are EVEN MORE musical/vocal/emotional robots at the via link below. You have to see the mouths!)
(via Music Machinery)
There is more than one way to automatically play a piano.
