Robot Rock: The Music is the Machine
A new educational facility serves as gallery, robotics lab, and performance space for explorations in electronics and art.
Published June 26, 2006
By Adelle Caravanos
If you’re on your way to catch a rock show at LEMURplex, don’t expect musicians with long, 80s-style hair, singing power ballads.
The “metal” rockers at this place are actually made of the stuff.
Opened this month by an art collective known as the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots (LEMUR), the 3,000-square-foot facility is a robotics lab, performance space, art gallery, and teaching center that will host classes to teach what the LEMUR people know best: how to make machines that make music.
Engineer and musician Eric Singer established this group of artists, technologists, and computer programmers six years ago to collectively create musical instruments that play themselves. Among LEMUR’s 50 musical robots is GuitarBot, an electrified slide guitar that can be controlled by a basic MIDI keyboard; TibetBot, a percussive instrument based on Tibetan singing bowls; and !rBot, a robotically controlled shell that opens to create a rattling noise, similar to maracas.
Teaching Technology
Singer and colleagues aim to educate adults and children in the multidisciplinary art and science of building a mechanical music-maker. It’s all about being able to integrate aesthetics with performance with programming, he says.
To involve neighbors from the surrounding communities of Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, Gowanus, and Red Hook, LEMURplex will hold low-cost classes and workshops for children and adults at all levels of technical knowledge. Starting in July, lessons will be offered in electronics, programming, sensors, robotics, various software programs, and all will be linked to the arts. Singer says support has come from organizations including the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts.
LEMURplex will also host lectures, installations of electronic and robotic art, and performances. And in 2007 Singer intends to establish a residency program to enable talented candidates in art and technology to utilize the center’s unique resources.
At least some of the instruments and musical equipment to be developed there will likely wind up on exhibit in spaces such as the Schenectady Museum in upstate New York, which is currently hosting the LEMUR-created installation Robots Rock!, featuring 25 robotic instruments that interact with visitors via feats of programming, software, and sensor technology.
Also read: Exploring the Biology Behind the Music We Love and Music on the Mind: A Neurologist’s Take
