An Analogue Interface for Musical Robots

Jason Long, Ajay Kapur, and Dale Carnegie

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract:

The majority of musical robotics performances, projects and installations utilise microcontroller hardware to digitally interface the robotic instruments with sequencer software and other musical controllers, often via a personal computer. While in many ways digital interfacing offers considerable power and flexibility, digital protocols, equipment and audio workstations often tend to suggest particular music-making work-flows and have resolution and timing limitations. This paper describes the creation of a hardware interface that allows direct communication between analogue synthesizer equipment and simple robotic musical instruments entirely in the analogue domain without the use of computers, microcontrollers or software of any kind. Several newly created musical robots of various designs are presented, together with a custom built hardware interface with circuitry that enables analogue synthesizers to interface with the robots without any digital intermediary. This enables novel methods of musical expression, creates new music-making work-flows for composing and improvising with musical robots and takes advantage of the low latency and infinite resolution of analogue circuits.

Citation:

Jason Long, Ajay Kapur, and Dale Carnegie. 2016. An Analogue Interface for Musical Robots. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1176072

BibTeX Entry:

  @inproceedings{Long2016a,
 abstract = {The majority of musical robotics performances, projects and
installations utilise microcontroller hardware to digitally interface the robotic
instruments with sequencer software and other musical controllers, often via a
personal computer. While in many ways digital interfacing offers considerable
power and flexibility, digital protocols, equipment and audio workstations often
tend to suggest particular music-making work-flows and have resolution and timing
limitations. This paper describes the creation of a hardware interface that
allows direct communication between analogue synthesizer equipment and simple
robotic musical instruments entirely in the analogue domain without the use of
computers, microcontrollers or software of any kind. Several newly created
musical robots of various designs are presented, together with a custom built
hardware interface with circuitry that enables analogue synthesizers to interface
with the robots without any digital intermediary. This enables novel methods of
musical expression, creates new music-making work-flows for composing and
improvising with musical robots and takes advantage of the low latency and
infinite resolution of analogue circuits.},
 address = {Brisbane, Australia},
 author = {Jason Long and Ajay Kapur and Dale Carnegie},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.1176072},
 isbn = {978-1-925455-13-7},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 pages = {51--54},
 publisher = {Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University},
 title = {An Analogue Interface for Musical Robots},
 track = {Papers},
 url = {http://www.nime.org/proceedings/2016/nime2016_paper0011.pdf},
 year = {2016}
}