|
Battle of the Bands: Rise of the Machines
|
The healthy competition between humankind and its technological creations is being played out on dance floors, concert halls and classrooms:
- New robots toot their own horns.
- A web site sings your email message.
- Students create scrap-metal instruments.
- A musician tours with his band of rockin' automatons.
The dividing line gets fuzzy: where does the instrument end and the musician begin? |
|
"Let them sing it for you," a sound art project by Erik Bunger, uses a library of sung words to sing email messages. Bunger scoured pop and rock songs to stock his program's vocabulary of recorded words; system users keeping point him to sources of missing ones.
Site visitors type their desired message, a sung version of the words is strung together in a cut-and-paste collage that can span Patsy Cline and Robert Plant. Visitors can have their message emailed to others, who then receive a URL that reconstructs the original message and song.
Listen to a musical message from the Museum of Music, or create your own!
Browse other features from Sweden's State Radio-C, host of Bunger's art project.
|
|
Rock guitarist Jay Vance's backup band should be well behaved, because they're all robots that he personally built and programmed. Vance, or J-Bot as he bills himself, created Drmbot0110 and Gtrbot666 so he wouldn't have to put up with the egos, nasty habits and surly attitudes of human musicians.
But as his band name, Captured! By Robots (C!BR), implies, J-Bot suffers still, but now from his FrankenSlacker bandmates. Gtrbot666 brags to the audience about its guitar chops (while putting down J-Bot's), and Drmbot0110 interrupts his master's between-song banter. But when the group is playing, it does rock, especially on metal and hard rock, which the bots seem to have a special affinity for. |
|
Computers control the show, of course, activating air valves that push mechanical fingers and drum sticks, and cause the robots to swing and sway with the music. And Vance is ultimately in command, having painstakingly programmed all the music and choreography. He taught himself all the computing and machining skills required to build his band of slaves, or masters, depending on how one looks at it. |
|
|
|
According to the New York Times, a former band mate of Vance's said, "[Vance] was amazing at his instrument. The thing is, he thought he was amazing at everyone else's instrument, too. He'd tell everybody else what to play." Perhaps C!BR is Vance's self-imposed, tongue-in-cheek penance for his early "control-freak" days. |
Visit Captured! by Robots site, with pictures, videos, and music clips
Read the New York Times article about C!BR [fee required]
|
|
Automakers generally aren't known for their music, but they are known for their robotics and other technologies. Several leading companies are using humanoid 'bots to battle for publicity for their industrial robotic capabilities.
Toyota’s latest is a 4-foot trumpeter that can play "When You Wish Upon a Star." According to the BBC, "For now, [Toyota] has no plans to sell or rent it. Instead it hopes to form a robot band to play at the 2005 World Exposition, being held in Aichi in central Japan. 'I'm confident that this will be a symbol of Toyota Group's technology,' said Toyota President Fujio Cho." In a recent public appearance, two of the robots performed a duet of "Trumpeter's Holiday."
Rival Honda has a walking robot called Asimo, while electronics giant Sony touts its technical skills with the singing and dancing Qrio, which has made a photo opportunity conducting the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra. |
Read the BBC article or follow additional article links
Read Toyota's press release about Partner Robot or visit Sony’s Qrio
|
At the University of Cincinnati, humans are clearly masters over their machines. First-year design students there recently gave a concert in which they played instruments they build themselves - from old dishwashers, refrigerators and stoves.
Over 100 students formed 18 groups, each of which performed an original composition on their appliances-turned-horns, chimes, bells, whistles, drums, and strings. Dishwashers were particularly fertile ground. The students created trumpets from their motors, saxes from their tubing, and bass drums from their inner frames. |
|
The purpose of the exercise was to teach students "about visual design and function by crafting for the ear," according to the University. Interior design professor James Postell said, "We can learn a lot about visual design issues from other arts and what we see every day. We can learn design from music, writing, movies, drama, cuisine, buildings and from appliances, too. Interior design and architecture are very similar to music. All require compositions that grow from individual, component parts."
Read about the concert from the University's news service
In New York, humans have squared off - in and out of court - on both sides of a dispute involving a computerized orchestral system. The Opera Company of Brooklyn has been using, or trying to use, a virtual orchestra created by Realtime Music Solutions. The small company claims it cannot afford to use an orchestra of live musicians, but wants to provide its company of fledgling opera singers as realistic an accompaniment as possible.
The local branch of the musicians' union has adamantly opposed the move, leading to a back and forth battle involving pickets and legal challenges. Several attempts at compromise - including one in which the OCB would use human musicians, but with union flexibility in pay scale and help with fundraising - do not appear to have held together.
Visit the Opera Company of Brooklyn, and read the April 21 notice that the OCB has voided its contract with the musicians' union.
Learn more from Realtime Music Solutions about their legal action against the musicians' union, and then visit Local 802 of the AFM
Finally, a recent edition of Electronic Musician highlights the benefits of using a computer as "a creative performance partner." The article "Get with the Interaction" shows how to use computers interactively in composition and performance, as distinct from more "dry and lifeless" coded scores.
Read the Electronic Musician article, with extensive written & recorded references and web links
Visit MIT's Hyperinstruments project, which includes several new human-machine collaborations
|
|
