Gibson’s Robot Guitar uses its revolutionary technology to keep itself perfectly tuned. But fully automated musicians are another matter―or are they? Indeed, mechanical musical instruments have been around since the 19th century, with the most commonly known being the relatively humble player piano.
But more sophisticated devices capable of recreating a whole band or small orchestra via mechanical and/or pneumatic means were also introduced in the mid-1800s, called variously orchestrions or nickleodeons. Here’s a vintage refurbished Kuhl & Klatt orchestrion in action, complete with lady “robot” percussionists!
In 2005, Lord of the Rings trilogy director Peter Jackson paid $100,000 for Ragtime Automated Music’s MIDI-updated version of such a no-man-band as a Christmas gift for his wife.
Here it plays the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” as the bemused Jackson looks on.
While the director’s bulky, $100K contrivance is largely a shotgun marriage of technologies a hundred years apart, a recent contest by Europe’s Artemisia Association found Netherlands’ TeamDARE engineering consortium taking second place with a state-of-the-art, digitally controlled robotic device that plays acoustic guitar with remarkable grace.
Here’s a look at more efforts to push the envelope of robot musicianship―and sometimes give them a more human form―over the years:
―― In 1954 Belgian nightclub owner Zenon Specht found the perfect answer for those sometimes difficult jazz trios. At his Antwerp Robot Club, customers plopped down the equivalent of a nickel to hear his self-designed and constructed (using old piano roll technology) Robot Band play three selections, ranging from bop to tango. They may have been largely a novelty act, but their expressions could change to fit the mood, while at holiday time appropriate costumes were of course de rigeur.
―― 1988’s World Expo in Brisbane, Autralia saw this now obscure Taito-built robotic guitar turn more than a few heads. Skillfully programmed to play a repertoire of several hundred classical pieces as well as Latin and jazz standards on a Kohno guitar, the instrument operated by an intricate network of tiny tubes carrying compressed air to its fretboard “fingers.”
―― When Jay Vance suggested replacing an unreliable drummer with a machine a decade ago, his friends probably thought the San Francisco rocker was only spinning another version of the age-old musician’s joke. But in 1997 they took notice when Jay built his first robot musician, one that used a crude arrangement of bicycle chains and pulleys to strum its autoharp body. His pals likely stopped laughing altogether when Vance quickly followed up with DRMBOT 0110, his four-stick drum machine. He dubbed his emerging droid back-up band Captured! By Robots, replacing the original “guitarist” with the menacing GTRBOT666, seven-feet of foul-speakered attitude that plays a macabre double-necked axe fashioned after a Flying V. Adopting an over-the-top shock-rock theatrical approach that openly challenges its audiences, Jay takes delight in noting “when the robots swear at the crowd and the crowd swears back, that’s when you know they’re real to the audience.” Here’s a clip of the band doing their typically twisted cover of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” at a club in 2007.
――Toyota and Honda have dominated Japanese auto making for years. But did you know that the two automotive titans have been robotic rivals as well? Honda’s surprisingly agile Asimo recently became the first cyborg to conduct a live human orchestra when it lead the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in a version of―what else?―“The Impossible Dream.” But Toyota’s Robot Quartet takes the gambit a step further―they are the band! That’s bandleader Harry and Chuck with the legs in the video; Dave and Ritchie on wheels.
―― Visitors to Melbourne, Autralia’s Big Day Out festival in January were entertained by Roborock, perhaps the world’s most minimalist bass-n-drum act. Indeed, the performance art trio doesn’t even have a bass player―it’s just industrial artist Frank Barnes’ robo-drummer accompanied by a pair of sleek, security-camera-headed robotic pole dancers that are the cyberchildren of artistic colleague/designer Giles Walker.
―― 40-year-old Hamilton, New Zealand electrical/software engineer Greg Locke spends his free time playing in local surf rock band the Hollow Grinders. But what’s gotten him renown of late is not his bass playing, but the musical side project he dubbed the Trons, a “band” literally created out of scavenged electronic parts from a photocopy card vending machine and other assorted odds and ends, partially financed by his hometown’s Community Arts Council, and run by a computer with a “secret” software package. “I just had an idea, got up from the couch and tried it,” Locke explains. “I thought ‘this might work.’ Even as a kid, I was building odd things.” But he also admits to mixed feelings about the international cult fame the Trons’ popular YouTube clip has brought him: “When all that (hype and coverage) started, I thought it was pretty crazy!”