04.Nov.09 1984’s most advanced robot played the keys
It’s called the WABOT-2 and back in 1984, it was hailed as the most advanced robot to have ever been built. Constructed and designed by Waseda University, WABOT-2 had 50 degrees of limb freedom, controlled by 80 microprocessors structured to mimic the human nervous system. It’s function (aside from speaking Japanese) was to play keyboard synthesizers using both hands as well as feet to toggle foot pedals. It could read sheet music with a camera “eye” and could listen to singing on the fly and adjust its playing pitch and tempo accordingly. All of this over 25 years ago. Mind blowing to say the least.
The video above features WABOT-2 playing a segment of “Silk Road” by Kitaro on a Yamaha FX-1 synthesizer (quite a kick ass instrument by the way).
19.Oct.09 Mixed feelings on Native Instruments Komplete 6
Straight out of Native Instruments design lab is Komplete 6 just released this month. We are huge fans of the Native Instruments suite of instruments and effects. Truly, they create some of the most full featured and sonically amazing virtual synths in the game, hands down. But with only a few substantial updates for this installment, we feel as though it may have been overkill to release a new version of Komplete so soon…
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19.Oct.09 Transform light sources into sound: Lumièrophone
Interesting. I could see a practical use for this being developed eventually.
18.Sep.09 Casio SK-1 commercial from 1985. Awesome!
So I was hunting around the net for some tasty vintage 8 bit sounding synth VSTi’s and found one that models a set of patches from the classic Casio SK-1 keyboard. Pretty tight/cheesy but in doing so I stumbled on this hella dope YouTube vid of the original 1985 commercial for this shitty/awesome keyboard. Definitely a good laugh!
I love the little disclaimer at the end: “soundtrack created with multitrack recording”.
