Robotic Percussive Aerophone

Percussive aerophones are configurable, modular, scalable, and can be constructed from commonly found materials. They can produce rich timbres, a wide range of pitches and complex polyphony. Their use by humans, perhaps most famously by the Blue Man Group, inspired us to build an electromechanically-actuated version of the instrument in order to explore expressive possibilities enabled by machines. The Music, Perception, and Robotics Lab at WPI has iteratively designed, built and composed for a robotic percussive aerophone since 2015, which has both taught lessons in actuation and revealed promising musical capabilities of the instrument.