music by programmed machinstruments... pretty cool

[MYSTERIOUS TRAVELLER]

http://www.animusic.com/previews/pre...sonant-chamber

this is a clip of the piece/instrument.


the whole 4:20 piece can be played on your audio player here: http://www.animusic.com/downloads/index.php

[Baribrotzer]

There's a bunch of those videos; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animusic.

For the real thing, take a look at Wintergaten's Marble Machine, or Pat Metheny's Orchestrion. Or, for a few laughs, try Captured by Robots, a mostly-robot punk band - not fantastic music, but definitely entertaining. There's also a robot metal band called Compressorhead out of Berlin, who've recruited John Wright from NoMeansNo to write music for them. And Z-Machines, out of the University of Tokyo.

Here's an article on robot bands: http://makezine.com/2015/08/25/5-robot-bands/

[interbellum]

http://www.animusic.com/previews/pre...sonant-chamber

this is a clip of the piece/instrument.


the whole 4:20 piece can be played on your audio player here: http://www.animusic.com/downloads/index.php

I have two DVD's from Animusic. A third one was crowd-funded succesfully, but didn't make it due to a lot of misfortune, bad management, illness.
Great stuff. http://www.animusic.com/

[A. Scherze]

They also did a clip for the Kansas DVD Device Voice Drum.

[MYSTERIOUS TRAVELLER]

I guess the thing that fascinated me was that giant freaky instrument conglomeration cluster

is that really an instrument? it sure seems to be playing every note

[JKL2000]

I have two DVD's from Animusic. A third one was crowd-funded succesfully, but didn't make it due to a lot of misfortune, bad management, illness.
Great stuff. http://www.animusic.com/

Oh, I read some of the notes on the crowdfunding page - sounds like it got really out of control.

I think that's all CGI, but it's pretty cool.

[Baribrotzer]

Is that really an instrument? It sure seems to be playing every note

I think that's all CGI, but it's pretty cool.

What he said.

It's pretty clearly CGI, but very carefully synced to the soundtrack.

But I don't know how they did it: Did they do all that by hand? Or did they map notes onto the "instruments", then use the music's MIDI tracks - it's pretty obviously all sequenced as well - to drive the animations? If they did it the second way, they'd only need to set up the overall protocol once, then every new video would only require mapping the notes and assigning "instruments" to the proper tracks.

[A. Scherze]

I don't think it works quite like that as the matter of predicting the future is involved and this also varies for each instrument.

For example, a ball ejected from a tube that hits an instruments or a xylophone bar on a moving chain (to get it into position under a striker) needs to known in advance so it can be timed with the note sounding. Even for something simple like a drum hit, the stick has to move in advance so that the tip hits the head at the moment when the note sounds. For a plucked string, the "finger" has to move into position before the string is picked.

Human players do the same thing, but the audience doesn't really think about it.

[Baribrotzer]

I don't think it works quite like that as the matter of predicting the future is involved and this also varies for each instrument.

For example, a ball ejected from a tube that hits an instruments or a xylophone bar on a moving chain (to get it into position under a striker) needs to known in advance so it can be timed with the note sounding. Even for something simple like a drum hit, the stick has to move in advance so that the tip hits the head at the moment when the note sounds. For a plucked string, the "finger" has to move into position before the string is picked.

Human players do the same thing, but the audience doesn't really think about it.

You could get around that by building the proper delay into each visual event:

Suppose that a representation of a drum reacts the fastest, and takes 2 milliseconds between when it receives the signal, the stick begins to move, and when the stick hits the drum. But a ball that comes out of a tube and hits a string reacts the slowest, and it takes 12 ms between the signal, the ball emerging to fly through the air, and when it hits the string. So you add a delay function to each event, and make the drum visual occur 10 ms after it gets the signal. Do that for each "instrument", and perhaps in some cases for each note. Then the visual events will all be in sync with one another.

Now they'll also all be 12 ms late with respect to the music. But that can be fixed by shifting the whole soundtrack 12 ms early. Then everything will be in sync.