When Kate read this post about a real man playing a robot trumpet, it reminded her of this story about robot people playing real trumpets, and also Captured by Robots, the utterly terrifying real-people-and-robots-jamming-together-with-blood band. Thanks, Kate! ps: Hey, look, the tiny robot is serenading the Google ads! "Click them, click them, click them for joy" he parps...
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Interesting how one man's kitsch is another man's science project. Just weeks after Peter Jackson's Robot Band was revealed to a shocked world, students at Georgia Institute of Technology (good initials!) have delivered 'Crazy J', a guitar-playing robot clad in stylish matt aluminium. Disappointingly, the sound clips are surprisingly lifelike. If 'Crazy J' gets together with P.E.A.R.T, then we've got ourselves a robotic White Stripes!
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Pictured are two new offerings from Death By Audio, who make beatiful, hardcore boutique pedals. The Evil Filter is a... multimode modular synth style filter. Even cooler is Robot, which "uses the same pitch-shifting chip as those children's toys that emulate Godzilla and Robots etc. We mix that with some wicked distortion and get the insane sound of the Robot. It has a light sensor, vibrato. It's very cool and Lo-Fi sounding synth effects" Prices will be high - their other pedals range from $150-$320. They'll be available from Analog Haven soon.
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Inspired by my current love of really old stories, but also by Palms Out Sounds fantastic post about Daft Punk samples (and by Ishkur, the mothership of all sample spots) I just put together this clip of the samples used on various tracks from Discovery and 'Robot Rock'. My thoughts, in order, were: 1) "Oh, well. Ha! That explains how they spend so much time being cool and making robot heads" 2) "Still, I could sample these tracks all day long, and it wouldn't sound like 5% of Daft Punk" 3) "OMFG! 'Release the Beast!' What a record! Why can't all music sound like this?"
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Cementimental writes: "I was randomly looking at very expensive Japanese metal robots on ToyboxDX.com when I found this". It's Compoboy, a 16inch tall toy robot made from the 80s hi-fi essentials: Reel-to-reels, graphic equalizers, vertical record players, smoked glass doors. The reel-to-reels launch rockets. Best of all: "There is also a strange, inexplicable feature that involves shoving little strips of white cardboard into the main component of the toy."
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I feel so guilty when people take the time to send me really great stuff and then I forget to post it. So here's a bit of karma-boosting cupboard emptying. There are some absolute treasures on this list, thanks Dave, Michael, Ian, K, Capzloc, Steve, Jason, Erik, RBurns, Mikey, JB, Circuit Master, Formicarium and Schism.
Zlad: Awesome video featuring a nun playing a Roland Axis.
NYC Soundlab: It's like a gym, for musicians. Pay the monthly fee, and you get to visit and use the studio gear. Tour and interview with the boss here, and Flickr set of pictures here.
The Keyboard Museum has a truly awesome collection of demo tapes from classic synths, from the Stylophone to the Fairlight,
Electric Shadows: A huge and wonderful collection of 'who played what', including Kraftwerk, Jean Michel Jarre, Vangelis, and Plastikman.
If you enjoyed Peter Jackson's Robot Band, but don't have $100k for the full experience, fear not! Ragtime West now have a eBay shop. What home would be complete without item 6193543378 - a full-sized banjo-playing machine, which runs on player piano rolls or MIDI (with a $1,500 optional kit). Someone has already bid $1,875, but it's on buy it now for $4,450... (thanks Kaden)
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If this is your first visit to Music Thing, welcome and enjoy your stay. Tom Whitwell, the founding father of Music Thing has gone away for a bit and stupidly left the site in the hands of a bunch of amateurs, some of whom he's never even met. When he returns he'll discover that Music Thing has been turned into a hub for porn and warez and a vehicle for my self pitying shampoo-commercial indie project 'Prsiu'. Not really. We'll be just be posting more links to things like this ridiculous turntable. The email function is offline at the mo, which is a shame because I love websites that let you send stuff off to a remote computer for processing, like Rasterbator and the brilliant Face Transformer, but you can still see the turntable in action on the pictures page. And don't worry Turntablists, you're not quite redundant yet. This robot isn't going to be winning the DMC world championships any time soon.
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So, Mikey just sends me an email with "!" in the subject line and this link. It's the site for Hiroshi Araki, who designs and builds wierd, wierd, wierd shit like this enormous robot valve hifi system. Obviously it's in Japanese, and obviously babelfish comes to the rescue: "The fact that it is in the stomach, famous moth lard 301 is with the record player." Also check out this bonkers reversible swivelling bass guitar.
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It's currently under attack from a horde of slashdot traffic, but you should still be able to witness P.E.A.R.T, the robotic drumkit inspired by Rush drummer/Ayn Rand enthusiast/travel writer Neil Peart (that's him in the picture, not the robot). The best bit of the site is the video clip showing P.E.A.R.T playing Silverchair's 'Tomorrow' along with a couple of the Uni of Louisiana students who built it. Interestingly, what it proves is that crappy MIDI drum patterns sound as crappy through a real drum kit as they do through your soundcard. DIY WEEK CONTINUES - CLICK FOR PART 3
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Marek Michalowski is a Ph.D. student in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. His latest project is Beatbots - cute little robots with microphone noses and video camera eyes which can dance to music. In the video on his site, the 'drum' clip is OK, but the clip of the robot dancing to Spoon's 'I turn my camera on' is fantastic. It's all done with Max/MSP, obviously. (Thanks, J-Chot)
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Bleep Labs BitBlob is the only thing to buy this Christmas. A patchable synth encased in a pyrex glass jar complete with glowing monsters. $216, limited edition of 30...
Another xmas essential is Benge's Twenty Systems album - a lovely booklet/CD package with twenty tracks recorded on twenty different systems, from Moog Modular to NED Synclavier. (More pics here at Hardformat)
New synth #1: Dave Smith Mopho, tiny yellow all-analog synth for $399 (from Analog Haven). Like the button marked 'push it', don't like the lack of knobs.
The Trons are a robot band from New Zealand (MySpace) (Thanks, Louis)
Wonderful podcast #1: Welcome to Mars, the series about sci-fi and the cold war is now a book and CD (and Simon James, who did the music, has an album on the way)
Where's the party at is a great-looking sampler module kit on a single PCB, complete with dozens of breakout points for circuit bending.
New synth #2: Moog are re-releasing their Taurus bass pedals, in a limited edition of 1,000. $1,695, all analog, based on the original circuitry but with midi and proper memory. People have been asking for this in forums for years, but I'm amazed they've actually done it.
David Dewaele from Soulwax (another MT reader) explains their extremely fun-sounding live setup to Future Music mag - a mix of Ableton and analog gear. Unfortunately, it's an audio slideshow, so rather than scanning through the article you have to listen for 8 minutes...
Wonderful podcast #2: Us and Them is a genuinely mind-blowing collection of Cold War propaganda music - you can download all seven episodes from the sidebar of the Clerkenwell Kid blog
New synth #3: Korg Microkorg XL - very long awaited follow up to the absurdly successful Microkorg (if they'd only sold the actual synths that appear in music videos, they'd still be rich). Gone are the wooden end cheeks and light up buttons, replaced by an interesting-but-ugly look slightly reminiscent of the Micromoog.
Steim is now safe. The Dutch Council for Culture has agreed to help fund the Amsterdam home of strange clicky music and gestural interfaces. The blog-inspired letter writing campaign apparently helped. (Previously...)
The Indamixx Laptop is a $499 netbook loaded with Linux music apps
In the not-awesome-but-understandable camp, the Chimera BC16 is currently off-sale as they catch up with back orders (finally). Shortly before that was announced, they put up the price of the wonderful BC16 to £280.00. Still a good price, but not the astonishing bargain it was at £116, when it was first announced. (Previously)
During brain surgery, "Banjo player Eddie Adcock was kept awake to perform while surgeons poked and prodded different areas of his brain." (With picture) (thanks, Samuel)
In October, someone claiming to represent the New Yorker got in touch, wanting to buy paid links...
So, I spotted this image on the mighty LOLBOTS, and thought - holy crap, it's Johnny Five playing a Yamaha GX-1. But it isn't. It's WABOT-2, a Japanese robot from 1985. It weighed 90kg, and was connected, via 13 fibreoptic cables, to a computer room 20 metres away. It could read a score, take requests from the audience and play along with a singer, listening to their voice and playing in tune. There's a good introduction here, and pictures here, here and here. The organ itself isn't a GX-1, but a rather less hip FX-1, which used FM synthesis rather than miles and miles of wire and analog circuits - which Matrix has written about at length - lots of nice pictures here.
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...that's the promise of eBay item #300118731239. Unfortunately it's just a pattern snipped out of an old magazine, but if you do buy and build this, please send a picture...
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OK, this takes a little bit of explaining. Vocaloid is a bit of Yamaha patented software which can sing - input the notes and the lyrics and off it goes. It's not sold by Yamaha, but in various different versions according to the voice. So, PowerFX have a version called Sweet Ann. Now you can buy an anime version where Hatsune Miku (some kind of schoolgirl sexbot) sings the words you've typed in. People have been making singing robot software for ages, but it's always just been a novelty. However, Vocaloid 2 / Hatsune Miku has been a huge hit in Japan (as I write, it's the best selling software on Amazon Japan). There are now tons of Vocaloid clips on Nico Nico Douga, the Japanese YouTube. The sample above is (as I'm sure you're now enjoying) a bonkers high-energy track with vocals from Hatsune Miku.(The original Finnish folk version is Leekspin by Loituma). The singing robots are here, and they're annoying. More on Hatsune at Gamersweb.it and Canned Dogs. Want more videos? this one is awesome, this girl seems to be really into it and this one should be on the Blade Runner soundtrack.
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When Kate read this post about a real man playing a robot trumpet, it reminded her of this story about robot people playing real trumpets, and also Captured by Robots, the utterly terrifying real-people-and-robots-jamming-together-with-blood band. Thanks, Kate!
Interesting how one man's kitsch is another man's science project. Just weeks after Peter Jackson's Robot Band was revealed to a shocked world, students at Georgia Institute of Technology (good initials!) have delivered 'Crazy J', a guitar-playing robot clad in stylish matt aluminium. Disappointingly, the sound clips are surprisingly lifelike. If 'Crazy J' gets together with P.E.A.R.T, then we've got ourselves a robotic White Stripes!
Posted by Tom Whitwell. Story permalink. 10 comments Post a Comment 
Pictured are two new offerings from Death By Audio, who make beatiful, hardcore boutique pedals. The Evil Filter is a... multimode modular synth style filter. Even cooler is Robot, which "uses the same pitch-shifting chip as those children's toys that emulate Godzilla and Robots etc. We mix that with some wicked distortion and get the insane sound of the Robot. It has a light sensor, vibrato. It's very cool and Lo-Fi sounding synth effects" Prices will be high - their other pedals range from $150-$320. They'll be available from Analog Haven soon.
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This is the Yellow Drum Machine, a beautiful little homemade robot which finds surfaces to drum on, records it's own drumming (using one of these little £12 sampler modules) then sets off to find somewhere else to play. The videos are adorable, and strangely reminiscent of KT Tunstall doing a similar thing. (via Make)
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Cementimental writes: "I was randomly looking at very expensive Japanese metal robots on ToyboxDX.com when I found this". It's Compoboy, a 16inch tall toy robot made from the 80s hi-fi essentials: Reel-to-reels, graphic equalizers, vertical record players, smoked glass doors. The reel-to-reels launch rockets. Best of all: "There is also a strange, inexplicable feature that involves shoving little strips of white cardboard into the main component of the toy."
Posted by Tom Whitwell. Story permalink. 4 comments Post a Comment 
If you enjoyed Peter Jackson's Robot Band, but don't have $100k for the full experience, fear not! Ragtime West now have a eBay shop. What home would be complete without item 6193543378 - a full-sized banjo-playing machine, which runs on player piano rolls or MIDI (with a $1,500 optional kit). Someone has already bid $1,875, but it's on buy it now for $4,450... (thanks Kaden)
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Rhetorical rVoice is a professional speech synthesis system - they build voices for artificial call centres and the like. Their demo page is perfect for generating, say, an earnest Spanish gentleman rapping 'Bring The Noise' [100k mp3], or a stoned valley girl doing 'Night of the Living Bassheads' [160k mp3]. If you're hunting for Radiohead/ Kraftwerk/ Hawking robot voices, then you'll have to look elsewhere.
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If this is your first visit to Music Thing, welcome and enjoy your stay. Tom Whitwell, the founding father of Music Thing has gone away for a bit and stupidly left the site in the hands of a bunch of amateurs, some of whom he's never even met. When he returns he'll discover that Music Thing has been turned into a hub for porn and warez and a vehicle for my self pitying shampoo-commercial indie project 'Prsiu'. Not really. We'll be just be posting more links to things like this ridiculous turntable. The email function is offline at the mo, which is a shame because I love websites that let you send stuff off to a remote computer for processing, like Rasterbator and the brilliant Face Transformer, but you can still see the turntable in action on the pictures page. And don't worry Turntablists, you're not quite redundant yet. This robot isn't going to be winning the DMC world championships any time soon.
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So, Mikey just sends me an email with "!" in the subject line and this link. It's the site for Hiroshi Araki, who designs and builds wierd, wierd, wierd shit like this enormous robot valve hifi system. Obviously it's in Japanese, and obviously babelfish comes to the rescue: "The fact that it is in the stomach, famous moth lard 301 is with the record player." Also check out this bonkers reversible swivelling bass guitar.
Posted by Tom Whitwell. Story permalink. 1 comments Post a Comment 
It's currently under attack from a horde of slashdot traffic, but you should still be able to witness P.E.A.R.T, the robotic drumkit inspired by Rush drummer/Ayn Rand enthusiast/travel writer Neil Peart (that's him in the picture, not the robot). The best bit of the site is the video clip showing P.E.A.R.T playing Silverchair's 'Tomorrow' along with a couple of the Uni of Louisiana students who built it. Interestingly, what it proves is that crappy MIDI drum patterns sound as crappy through a real drum kit as they do through your soundcard. 
Marek Michalowski is a Ph.D. student in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. His latest project is Beatbots - cute little robots with microphone noses and video camera eyes which can dance to music. In the video on his site, the 'drum' clip is OK, but the clip of the robot dancing to Spoon's 'I turn my camera on' is fantastic. It's all done with Max/MSP, obviously. (Thanks, J-Chot)
Posted by Tom Whitwell. Story permalink. 26 comments Post a Comment 
So, I spotted this image on the mighty LOLBOTS, and thought - holy crap, it's Johnny Five playing a Yamaha GX-1. But it isn't. It's WABOT-2, a Japanese robot from 1985. It weighed 90kg, and was connected, via 13 fibreoptic cables, to a computer room 20 metres away. It could read a score, take requests from the audience and play along with a singer, listening to their voice and playing in tune. There's a good introduction here, and pictures here, here and here. The organ itself isn't a GX-1, but a rather less hip FX-1, which used FM synthesis rather than miles and miles of wire and analog circuits - which Matrix has written about at length - lots of nice pictures here.
Posted by Tom Whitwell. Story permalink. 1 comments Post a Comment 
...that's the promise of eBay item #300118731239. Unfortunately it's just a pattern snipped out of an old magazine, but if you do buy and build this, please send a picture...
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