Archive for the 'Music' Category

Clara is a creepy little robot baby with a duct tape diaper on her midsection instead of her ass, and a hankering to play the theremin. Clara was created by Sarah Angliss, a musician and sound artist. And Clara will be in my nightmares henceforth, terrifying me with her creepiness and occasionally shitting herself, while providing her own otherworldly theremin soundtrack.

This music video looks like it was shot in the 60’s and I believe it may be some kind of cult propaganda. The damn baby keeps making weird sounds and waving a kitchen whisk everywhere.

[Robot Living]

Some robots built by the Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research have performed a rendition of Happy Birthday to celebrate the 100th birthday of the Science Museum in the UK. These three tenors of terror produce a sound that should keep the trio from ever getting any gig. Ever.

What’s interesting is that they’ve been programmed to communicate and teach each other to sing through the simple process of singing to each other. Videos are below and they are painful to watch/hear.
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Yes. A robot can even be Scottish. “McBlare”, a robotic bagpipe player, uses an ordinary bagpipe and an air compressor to supply air. All the while, electro-magnetic devices, such as an outlet, powers the fingers that play the music by covering and opening the 10 holes on the bagpipe. The whole machine is controlled by a computer that is pre-set with a couple of traditional bag-pipe songs in its memory. It is also possible for McBlare to add its own sounds to the authentic, simple melodies on a piano looking keyboard. The signals or musical notes are sent to the computer again which are translated to notes on the bagpipe.

[CMU]

What can you really say about this music video?

Let me tell you how I became like this,
My dad was an ipod and my mum was a nintendo DS,
They somehow got together and created me…

I think YouTube commenter BentNeatly says it best:

this song is so retarded and this video is terrible, and i like it quite a lot

Chee Lor and Mike Teigen, students at the Fox Valley Technical College, built a Guitar Hero-playing robot for their automated manufacturing systems class. A camera on the robot sees the notes on the screen and plays them on the guitar. They were inspired by a blackjack playing robot, that worked well for its inventor, so they hope this bot will get them a good job or two.

[Gizmowatch]

The Irregular Incurve began life as an attempt to design a new acoustic instrument that humans couldn’t wrap their hands or mouths around. As you see the result is a robot dinosaur rib cage that can play music. This is how Fred Flintstone played the harp. Except that he used real dinosaur bones.

It uses a MIDI input device and can play twelve different tones and it can be tuned so it can play different music. Hard to describe what it sounds like. Check out the video below.
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We’ve seen tons of robotic musicians, but this one integrates perfectly into the piece without any human intervention. Shimon is a robotic marimba player created by Georgia Tech’s Guy Hoffman, Gil Weinberg (the director of the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology) and Roberto Aimi of Alium Labs.

It recently made its debut by sensing the music from a piano and reacting to provide complementary percussion. What’s interesting is that there’s no delay. It analyzes the classification of chords, estimates the human’s tempo and attempts to extract features from the human’s melodic phrases and styles. So it actually meshes with the other playing.

[Engadget]

A pair of Robonova-1 kit robots teamed up with “Chi” (Naoki Nokubo) of the pop-trio Shūchishin for a special performance on Fuji TV’s “The Best House 1-2-3″ variety show last night. The new trio is named “Robo-Shūchishin”. They performed “Shūchishin,” the original group’s self-titled hit single.

Sure, the robot members sang off-key and sounded…well, robotic, but there were some surprises. Skip to about 1:20 into the video. Three guesses as to what happens.

[Pink Tentacle]

It’s been awhile since Eminem slung musical insults. This new video features all kinds of craziness, including Star Trek and at one point, a transforming mecha-Godzilla type bot.

“In April, an auction by Julien’s Auctions at the Beverley Hills Hilton will provide an unprecedented look into the private world of Michael Jackson. Observer Music Monthly has obtained this world exclusive preview of some of the items going under the hammer.”
Michael Jackson memorabilia? Sign me up. I don’t have $3,000 to blow on a robot bust of Jackson from Moonwalker, but hopefully you do. There’s lots of other crazy stuff in this auction like a Peter Pan themed golf cart. But only the robot head will give you nightmares, unless you’re prepubescent—then this whole collection is like paraphernalia from hell.

[Guardian] VIA [Gizmodo]