Making Techno with Music Robots

Making Techno with Music Robots is a sound installation in which robots play unusual homemade musical instruments.

A snare (small drum) made of hard disks, an electronic kalimba, and a pneumatic hi-hat (percussion instrument with a pair of cymbals), for example, produce incomparable sounds. The media artist, music producer, and robotics engineer Moritz Simon Geist builds all his robotic instruments himself. They are connected to a small MIDI keyboard that controls the extraordinary musical instruments.

Small piezo microphones record the sounds and play them back via an amplifier. LEDs on the instruments visualize the sound. The result is a futuristic sound world that is also visually unique due to the self-built instruments and robots.