I just want to explore building some kinetic machines and instruments that bang, clang, perhaps whistle when connected to my laptops music sequencer. My goal is to find some collaborators on some quick turn around projects that will encourage use an experimentation with arduino or raspberry pi based MIDI conversion and actuation.
I’d like to build and repurpose a few different machines in order to perform some kind of performance/gig with them at the Canopy brewery at the end of the summer.
Anyone want to play and explore making some kind of robot band? Emphasis is on play, fun and learning
check out this chap, Felix Thorn as inspiration. I met him a few years ago. his machines are beautiful. I’d be happy with a couple of motorised drum sticks or repurposed drills.
I’ve had similar thoughts on and off for years. I reckon a set of tuned pipes á la Blue Man Group would be easy to automate.
I dream of building a huge machine for making dance music at the proper volume level, acoustically. Great big sub-bass organ pipes. Huge drums and big bits of metal clattering around. Would be amazing.
In terms of doing this for real, I think the main enemy will be latency. The thing that hits the other thing has to move immediately when triggered, and it has to move a very short distance before hitting the other thing. Low-level electronics, and simple actuators I think. MIDI is so ancient and dumb, there must be designs out there for circuits with a chip or two that can de-mux MIDI and spit out simple pulses on separate connectors.
I agree on latency, sync and timing are generally a bit or a mare. Was thinking solenoids could be fun to tinker with. MIDI is pretty dumb, there’s OSC as well, but they joy of MIDI is that it’s fairly straightforward to find sequencers or controllers to plug in without making specialist interfaces.
fantastic. Why don’t we hold on a few days and see who’s interest it sparks, then we can meet up with some ideas and think about the types of materials we have/can find.
Ah, it’s an exhaust mixer from a high-bypass jet engine (ie the kind on passenger planes). It reduces the noise created by the integration of the cold bypass air and the hot turbine exhaust, by increasing the surface area of the boundary between the two airstreams.
fantastic stuff Glenn! I’ll bring my box of electronics next week. Maybe we could see what types of materials there is that can be recycled into instruments? If you’ve got any weird odd bit and bobs at home bring them in. Maybe lets try and do some small stuff until we’ve sorted the back part of the workshop out properly.
