Technology plays tunes

Andrew Edwards

Les Paul invented the electric guitar. Eric Singer helped to develop

the robot one.

Certainly, GuitarBot doesn’t look like a classic Gibson or Fender

model. Each of the machine’s four strings run along the length of a

separate neck. At the base of each string, four picks attached to a

rotating shaft pluck the strings. Moving bridges slide along each

string to play each chord.

“Almost all of our robots are handmade,” Singer said. “One of our

philosophies is to make robots that are instruments, not robots that

play instruments. We’re not taking existing instruments and

retrofitting robotics to them.”

GuitarBot is appearing at UC Irvine with other manufactured

musicians at an exhibition at UC Irvine’s Beall Center of Art and

Technology. The show is scheduled to run through March 19. Singer

hopes his stop at the Irvine campus will be the first stop on tour

for GuitarBot.

Singer, 39, was aided by two others, Kevin Larke and David

Bianciardi, in the creation of GuitarBot. He founded the Brooklyn,

N.Y.-based League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots, or LEMUR, in

2000 to combine his twin interests in music and technology. Singer is

a credited saxophonist on CDs by ska outfits Metro Stylee and the

Slackers and in 1984, during his first year at Carnegie Mellon

University, he developed an electronic saxophone that was programmed

via a green-screened Apple 2 computer.

In addition to GuitarBot, other robots designed by Singer and the

rest of the Lemur crew at UC Irvine include the percussionists

ForestBot, TibetBot, !rBot [pronounced chick-are-bot] and an

assortment of ModBots.

ForestBot is no single entity. It is 25 machines with egg rattles

attached to the ends of 10-foot stalks that sway and vibrate when

activated by machines at the bottom of each stalks. The stalks are

arranged in groups of five, each set attached to a base.

TibetBot is built from three Tibetan singing bowls and six arms

that strike each bowl like a bell. The bells are traditional Buddhist

instruments and produce a droning sound.

Resembling a giant mouth or clam shell, !rBot opens to reveal an

array of shaking Peruvian goat hoof rattles. The ModBots are simpler,

smaller designs with single percussive devises like rattles or

scrapers.

“I was most intrigued by GuitarBot,” UC Irvine graduate student

Aaron Huisenfeldt said after watching a video preview of the

exhibition. “Just by the fact that the music had the technical

accuracy of MIDI with the more natural sound.”

All LEMURBots use MIDI, musical instrument digital interface,

programs. Singer described MIDI as “a printer port for music” that

allows an instrument attached to a computer to emit sound like a

printer produces text.

LEMUR’s engineers and composers don’t see GuitarBot as a future

replacement for flesh-and-blood artists, Singer said. They just want

to take music in new directions.

“We’re not trying to create musicians that play better than

humans, we’re just trying to make music that sounds differently,”

Singer said.

GuitarBot has performed with human performers. Singer has a video

of the machine jamming with violinist Mari Kimura.

Could a LEMURbot be a part of a human band?

“That would be cool; why not?,” LEMUR designer Bill Bowen said. “I

don’t think they always have to be by themselves.”

* ANDREW EDWARDS covers business and the environment. He can be

reached at (714) 966-4624 or by e-mail at andrew.edwards@latimes.com.