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}
}