Expressive Machines Musical Instruments has developed an interesting drum system that can play many notes at the same time and much faster than humans could. Not sure how they kept the budget to $200 though.
"Troy Rogers, Steven Kemper and Scott Barton compose for their mechanized instruments with the goal of exploring new "temporal, timbral, dynamic and harmonic possibilities." The result sounds like no humans we’ve ever heard. These Ph.D. students built the instruments on their own dime, constructing Madi for a mere $200 in materials.
We are a group of composers seeking new modes of acoustic sound generation. Our goal is to develop and compose for instruments that maximize temporal, timbral, dynamic, and harmonic possibilities. This quest has led us to create robotic musical instruments."
Via: Wired
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Sorry guys but that noise sounds just like a child bashing away on a bucket ! its terrible
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This is a lot cooler. An improvising robot drummer.
http://gtcmt.coa.gatech.edu/?p=67
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Thanks Sean,
That is a cool project!
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I thought so. The whole Music Technology Center here at Tech is awesome. If you’ve got some extra time, click around there and check out the other projects. Distributed music (audience position is monitored and processed and then fed to the musicians), Robotic musicianship, new instruments… It’s all quite fascinating.
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“Noise is only ever an overwhelming, in some provisional [temporal, spatial, conceptual] context, of a particular subject’s ability to re-/cognize pattern.” -t. coffey