Absolut-ly Fascinating: Robotic Band Plays Your Requests
What do you get when you combine a couple of MIT grads, robot-controlled instruments, and an unlimited supply of Absolut vodka? A giant kinetic sculpture that composes music based on input from website visitors. Known as the Absolut Quartet, the musical machine is the creation of engineer-designers Dan Paluska and Jeff Lieberman and is part of Absolut Machines, a global technology project sponsored by the spirits company that asks, “In an Absolut world, would machines be creative?”
Paluska explained his creation to us when we stopped in to see the Absolut Quartet in New York City, where it has just opened for public viewing at a ground-level space on Orchard Street. “Essentially, you go to this website, sign up in the queue, and then play a little melody,” he said, sidling up to a laptop and tapping out a few notes on a virtual piano keyboard that appeared on the screen. “The machine will take that melody and use it in a composition.” Walking over to the sculpture itself, which would fit inside a spacious walk-in closet, Paluska pointed to the speaker that plays user-created melodies for the machine to interpret and explained the set-up: nine percussion elements mounted at the front, a 32-key marimba activated by rubber balls shot from a robotic cannon, and a row of spinning wine glasses played by robotic fingers. As for the fourth member of the quartet, that’s the human player of the virtual piano.
The Absolut Quartet’s three-minute songs are not only surprisingly soulful but also visually stunning. When a chord is played, the rubber balls fly almost six feet into the air before hitting the marimba keys, making one suspect a squad of tiny, highly-skilled jugglers with meticulous timing lurking beneath. “You get the suspense before the note happens, and then you can also watch the balls roll back,” said Paluska. “So you have a premonition of the music and then an afterthought of it.” So just how responsive is the machine to user input? “If you’re used to playing a guitar, it’s not like that,” Paluska said. “But if you put in a melody, you can feel how it responds. As with everything else, you’re going to have to use it several times before you can really learn how it responds to you.”
And you don’t have to be there in person to jam with the robots. On the Absolut Machines site, visitors can interact with the machine and then see and hear the results in real time via four web cameras. One word of advice: before you attempt to explain to people exactly what it is you’re doing online with the musical robots, be sure to have a bottle of Absolut close at hand. After a few sips, it will all make much more sense.
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Nadine Cheung
Editor, The Job Post
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