Orchestrions

… are machines or robots designed to make or perform music and go back as far as the 1700s to the first music boxes and an autonomous mechanical flute player to entertain the Parisian elite. Earlier examples are extant throughout Asia and the middle east. These designs embody a harmonious synthesis between arts and science; spurring on technological innovation in pursuit of the joy of music. Key advancements in computation can be traced back to these early efforts.

Founded in 2023, electrical engineering and mechanical engineering multidisciplinary senior capstone efforts collaborate across programming, electrical, mechanical, and musical disciplines to build a robotic steel tongue drum performer system. It will use mechanical actuation like solenoids and motors to play notes on the steel tongue drum. These note events should be able to be sent discreetly from a computer or other controller using a USB MIDI protocol, and also possibly be able to generate musical sequences autonomously and algorithmically based on incoming sensor input and human interactivity (making it a “robot” and not just a machine).

Side Quest

En route to producing the robot, we decided it would be neat to create a general-purpose modular and reconfigurable solenoid percussion kit. This would enable rapid prototyping of instruments that require simple striking of things at 3 different dynamic levels.

The video below is also on one of the student’s YouTube channel and is at 200k views!