Humanity has long harbored a fear of robots. Fear that they would take our jobs. Fear that they would, perhaps, annihilate us as a species. What we didn’t think to fear is that they might one day make a fine replacement for musicians, too.
The orchestra you see here is called Automatic Orchestra. Students from the University of the Arts, Bremen and the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design created the setup, which consists of 12 pods, each with a microcontroller mounted on a printed circuit board and attached to speakers. Wires run from one pod to the next, transferring data and creating a network of musical bots.
What you hear is the pods essentially playing a game of algorithmic telephone where music, originating in pod number one, is passed to its neighbor via a midi input. The microcontroller receives the data and processes it according to its algorithm. Pod number two might drop the note an octave while number three might slow the rhythm. Some pods, in an effort to introduce improvisation, are programmed with a measure of unpredictability to mimic how humans might perform.
The music takes on different qualities depending upon the artist who programmed it. David Beermann, a student at Bremen, says he was interested in creating a melodic composition in the vein of Steve Reich or John Cage. “One of the core ideas that we had was that we didn’t want to make just noise,” he says. Beermann points out that music is really its own form of algorithm. Chords and rhythm are mathematical in nature, and so lend themselves to being encoded much like zeros and ones. Julian Hespenheide, another student who worked on the project, says he was more interested in creating a rhythm-based composition. What all of the songs have in common is that each sounds distinctly non-human, despite the fact that they are the product of the interplay between human and machine intention. You can listen to all of the music here on Soundcloud.
