SPARK‘can we do stuff with you?’; ‘can you do this?’. Now
it’s just trying to work out how to keep it going, without
it still being so intensive from a time commitments
[aspect for] volunteering on this.
“We’ve got a team of Masters students working on
this Orchestra this year. They’re building a new core
of the Orchestra – a new conductor, and a few new
instruments and the improvements that’s going to
provide will make the Orchestra so much easier to use,
and we’ll be able to pass it out to more people. More
people will be able to take it out on the road to events
like this. Hopefully that will start a whole new cycle of
getting kids building new instruments.
“[You program the instruments in] quite a few
different ways. We’ve got robots based around quite
a lot of different controllers. We’ve got some with
Raspberry Pis, some with Arduinos, some that use the
little Crumble controllers, which are really simple things
based on the Arduino. The Raspberry Pis and Arduinos
can take a MIDI file, so a little bit of manipulation to
it and [you can] program it onto the Arduino or the Pi.
The Crumbles are a lot simpler, so they’re controlled a
lot more from our robot conductor. Each time they are
needed to play, the conductor will send them a signal.
“When the Orchestra started a couple of years
ago, one of the big themes we wanted was reusing,
recycling, upcycling. Pretty much all the instruments
have been made by school kids – both primary school
and secondary school. We’ve got a couple made by
university students, but pretty much everything else
was made by school kids.
“We’re on social media – just search for ‘robot
orchestra manchester’. We put pictures up; we’ve got
lots of videos of the different songs as well.”Above
When not making
robots play music,
Will works on radio
telescope receiversWhen the orchestra started a couple of years
ago, one of the big themes we wanted was
reusing, recycling, upcycling”
”
Left
Robots aren’t
limited to just two
hands, so can play
music of almost
any complexity