Posts Tagged ‘robot’

Disorderly Animatronic Bands From Hell

Sunday, January 25th, 2009

Being in a successful band requires musical skill, charisma, and guts. Here’s my list of robot bands (and the people that gave birth to them) that have “got the stuff” and really know how to move a crowd by leveraging their inhuman abilities for the sake of human entertainment.

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This is the Nuclear Diode Robot Band based in Washington in the early 1980s. So many of these stories start out with some guy with a garage and a dream. Technically speaking these robots are more like boomboxes holding musical instruments, but their air instrument enthusiasm makes them more endearing.

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Video: Violin vs. Robot Guitar, With Mari Kimura and GuitarBot

Saturday, August 2nd, 2008

Mari Kimura is an experimental string player extraordinaire, regularly venturing to the edge of what’s possible at the meeting of acoustic and electronic technology. GuitarBot is a “guitar”-playing robot (perhaps more reminiscent of a shamisen), an invention of Eric Singer, founder of the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots. The two meet above in a lovely video – not new, but well worth watching any old time, as reminded to us by Richard Swelling’s Etherbomb blog. Mari writes in comments on YouTube:

HI, Mari here. For those wondering what’s happening: Behind the white box, there is a Mac and an audio interface. I am running a software MaxMSP, which is LISTENING to the pitch. loundess and the timing of the violin. The ‘patch’ I created in Max contains certain interactive instructions such as “listen to the E (highest open string on the violin)”. For example in the beginning, if you listen carefully you notice when I play above E, it stops. Iinteractions change in predetermined time frames.

It’s a reminder that, technology aside, the key ingredient in electro-acoustic music is great musicianship.

Quite nice stuff! And the video is shot by my friend Liubo Borrisov; Liubo, if you’re out there, say hi.

Originally from Create Digital Music by Peter Kirn
reBlogged by InterAccess to Geekery – Audio

Robot cupcakes!

Saturday, June 7th, 2008

Flickr user and master cupcakist Hello Naomi (she of the fantastic Super Mario and Pac Man cupcakes) has outdone herself with these interchangeable robot cupcakes whose bodies, heads and legs can be swapped around. Deliciously awesome!

Link

(via IZ Reloaded)



Originally from Boing Boing
by Cory Doctorow

reBlogged by InterAccess to Geekery – DIY