Robotic Percussive Aerophone

Scott Barton, Karl Sundberg, Andrew Walter, Linda Sara Baker, Tanuj Sane, and Alexander O'Brien

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract

Percussive aerophones are configurable, modular, scalable, and can be constructed from commonly found materials. They can produce rich timbres, a wide range of pitches and complex polyphony. Their use by humans, perhaps most famously by the Blue Man Group, inspired us to build an electromechanically-actuated version of the instrument in order to explore expressive possibilities enabled by machines. The Music, Perception, and Robotics Lab at WPI has iteratively designed, built and composed for a robotic percussive aerophone since 2015, which has both taught lessons in actuation and revealed promising musical capabilities of the instrument.

Citation

Scott Barton, Karl Sundberg, Andrew Walter, Linda Sara Baker, Tanuj Sane, and Alexander O'Brien. 2018. Robotic Percussive Aerophone. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1302645

BibTeX Entry

@inproceedings{Barton2018,
 abstract = {Percussive aerophones are configurable, modular, scalable, and can be constructed from commonly found materials. They can produce rich timbres, a wide range of pitches and complex polyphony. Their use by humans, perhaps most famously by the Blue Man Group, inspired us to build an electromechanically-actuated version of the instrument in order to explore expressive possibilities enabled by machines. The Music, Perception, and Robotics Lab at WPI has iteratively designed, built and composed for a robotic percussive aerophone since 2015, which has both taught lessons in actuation and revealed promising musical capabilities of the instrument. },
 address = {Blacksburg, Virginia, USA},
 author = {Scott Barton and Karl Sundberg and Andrew Walter and Linda Sara Baker and Tanuj Sane and Alexander O'Brien},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.1302645},
 editor = {Luke Dahl, Douglas Bowman, Thomas Martin},
 isbn = {978-1-949373-99-8},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {June},
 pages = {409--412},
 publisher = {Virginia Tech},
 title = {Robotic Percussive Aerophone},
 url = {http://www.nime.org/proceedings/2018/nime2018_paper0091.pdf},
 year = {2018}
}