There's a long tradition of robotic music production, from player pianos and glitchy electronic music of Felix's Machines to the steam-driven "power trio" Z-Machines. Much of the electro-mechanical process, however, remains quite esoteric to most. With dadamachines, a DIY robot music toolkit, Berlin-based creative technologist Johannes Lohbihler wants to make this type of musical creation accessible to just about everyone. A plug-and-play MIDI-controller and accessories kit, which Lohbihler is now crowdfunding, dadamachines allows users to build live automatic shows as well as musical setups for recording.
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Lohbihler tells Creators that his passion for building music robots grew out of an interest in combining interaction design with tangible interfaces, specifically for music. For him, dadamachines—which the band joasihno recently took on tour—is a way of creating a multisensory experience that could bring audiences and laptop musicians and DJs closer together. It is also an opportunity to create something open-source for users.
"On my Journey building dadamachines I met many great people, like Johannes Taelman, who build The HAT with Godfried-Willem Raes for Aphex Twin," says Lohbihler. "We share a belief in open source. I think openness is really important for this topic. I hope to build community of like-minded people that share their builds and compositions."MIDI is the universal connection to datamachines's software, and Lohbihler says it can take input from iPhones, iPads, hardware and laptops. To configure it, users can access a learn mode, which allows them to avoid a software download and simply press a button, which sends all notes to the channels stacked up and mapped to its 12 outputs. An advanced learn mode offers greater flexibility in mapping the outputs.
"For people growing with the system we want to over a configuration tool in the future," Lohbihler says. "And there is always the way to extend software yourself with Arduino as we are 100% compatible with that."Lohbihler says that while studio and touring musicians will be most interested in dadamachines, he hopes hobby musicians get in on the fun as well. He also believes artists who want to build sound-based interactive installations will find dadamachines useful, while educators will find it useful for teaching students text-based coding, electronics, and robotics.
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