Five Robots Playing Pentatonic, Polyrhythmic Songs

Christian Faubel

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract

Five robots playing five tuned bells by striking them with a mallet. Each robot is controlled by a minimalist, neurally inspired analogue oscillator. These oscillators are mutually connected and connected to a pacemaker oscillator, and through network connectivity, they will synchronize at different ratios with the pacemaker. Slow-running analog oscillators of the same type switch on and off the connectivity and modulate the activation of the robots' oscillators. Only through these changing network configurations does a musical score that alternates between coordinated polyrhythms, random structure and moments of silence emerges. The complex interaction between the analogue oscillators is visualized with a computer program that graphically displays the changing relations of the oscillators as multiple x-y plots.

Citation

Christian Faubel. 2024. Five Robots Playing Pentatonic, Polyrhythmic Songs. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15027177

BibTeX Entry

@article{nime2024_installations_12,
 abstract = {Five robots playing five tuned bells by striking them with a mallet. Each robot is controlled by a minimalist, neurally inspired analogue oscillator. These oscillators are mutually connected and connected to a pacemaker oscillator, and through network connectivity, they will synchronize at different ratios with the pacemaker. Slow-running analog oscillators of the same type switch on and off the connectivity and modulate the activation of the robots' oscillators. Only through these changing network configurations does a musical score that alternates between coordinated polyrhythms, random structure and moments of silence emerges. The complex interaction between the analogue oscillators is visualized with a computer program that graphically displays the changing relations of the oscillators as multiple x-y plots.},
 address = {Utrecht, Netherlands},
 articleno = {12},
 author = {Christian Faubel},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.15027177},
 editor = {Laurel Smith Pardue and Palle Dahlstedt},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {September},
 numpages = {5},
 pages = {49--53},
 presentation-video = {https://vimeo.com/912950719},
 title = {Five Robots Playing Pentatonic, Polyrhythmic Songs},
 track = {Installations},
 url = {http://nime.org/proceedings/2024/nime2024_installations_12.pdf},
 year = {2024}
}