It’s over. Improvisational jazz was the last, robot-free area humans had left, and now it’s tainted by the machines.
Team koelse.org have created the Jazz Trash robot for the upcoming Artbots ’08 competition, and as soon as the cobbled-together robot’s music hit our ears, we liked it. The team’s main idea is to connect a large number of experimental instruments together producing a huge array of strange sounds from recycled electro-mechanical components: “Anything from circuitbent toys to hardware-hacked vacuumcleaners.” Interestingly the interactions mean that Jazz Trash can be sort of tuned, but what the end music will be is unpredictable, which explains the random, ear-grabbing nature of the sounds it makes in the video.
newVideoPlayer("hddvddead_giz.flv", 475, 376,"");As if 1080p video, full-resolution audio, net connectivity and multi-tuner signal decoding wasn’t enough, Toshiba’s HD DVD team had even cooked up a system of embedded animatronic control before the format was put out of its misery. In this video left over from CES 2008, this little mechanical jazz band playing the Duke Ellington classic “Take the A Train” is controlled by, that’s right, an HD DVD disc. Here’s how:
