Ars Electronica: Quartet exhibit

Posted on Jan 02, 2010 12:22 pm
J-bot
Byte-Mixer
Member Since: Dec 04, 2007

One of the places we visited on our honeymoon was the Ars Electronica museum in Linz, Austria. They had a lot of really neat exhibits, but one that was particularly impressive in the kinetics area was a robotic music generator.

Basically it is a giant marimba with some percussive pieces built in, and the generator shoots balls out to hit the bars. Pretty neat to watch in person, but the videos are kinda cool too.

Supposedly a video is supposed to automatically post itself to their youtube profile minutes after you play, but I could not find the one that Heather did, either that or I did not recognize it. Though I put a couple of my own in just today via their web interface.

www.quartet.cc I think shows either the current playback, or a live feed...not sure which it is. Anyway, I'm not sure if you can interact with it past museum hours, but anyway here's an example. I tried using the web interface, but I think the lag killed some of the notes I input, it still sounded neat though. :)

It plays the original melody first, then after a few seconds, generates a composition based off that melody.

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