Five Robots Playing Pentatonic, Polyrhythmic Songs

Five robots playing five tuned bells by striking them with a mallet. Each robot is controlled by a minimalist, neurally inspired analogue oscillator. These oscillators are mutually connected and connected to a pacemaker oscillator, and through network connectivity, they will synchronize at different ratios with the pacemaker. Slow-running analog oscillators of the same type switch on and off the connectivity and modulate the activation of the robots' oscillators. Only through these changing network configurations does a musical score that alternates between coordinated polyrhythms, random structure and moments of silence emerges. The complex interaction between the analogue oscillators is visualized with a computer program that graphically displays the changing relations of the oscillators as multiple x-y plots.