This “Yellow Drum Machine” looks more like a small construction type of bot then an actual drummer, but don’t let his looks fool you. He’s talented. He will more or less wander around your house like a caffeinated teen, searching for “playable” surfaces. It creates and combines samples on the fly into rhythms. One cool feature is that when it hears you making noise or clapping, it will join in after it measures the speed.

Check out a video of it rocking out on a glass of lemonade after the jump.
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What can I say, I’m in love. I just have to keep posting Keepon vids whenever I can find them, in the vain hope that somehow, someone will just SEND ME HIM TO PLAY WITH. Does Keepon dance to bagpipes? I could test it out, you know. It could be vitally important.

The sweatband absolutely kills me.

[ BeatBots ]

This robot arm is certainly not the most menacing orchestra conductor I’ve ever seen, but that’s a good thing, right? Now, I’ll be totally honest: I don’t speak French, and the website is in French, so who knows what the story is with this thing. The performance was in Laval, France, but I’m not sure what was actually behind the arm movements… As in, was it all preprogrammed, or was there some inherent randomness like a human conductor would have?

If anyone speaks French, do us all a favor and post in the comments.

[ Robot-orchestra.fr ]

Considering the sheer magnitude of the cute+awesomeness that Keepon packs into his squishy little body, it’s somewhat surprising that we don’t see him around more, which makes this new(ish) video a treat. Plus, the guy he’s chillin’ with is Daniel H. Wilson, author of How To Survive a Robot Uprising and most recently How To Build a Robot Army. Buy and read them both immediately, but be sure to read the first one BEFORE the second one, or you’ll be sorry.

[ BeatBots ] VIA [ Suicide Bots ]

Developed by Japanese researchers, this is the world’s first Saxophone-playing Robot. It’s capable of playing some highly complex pieces like John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps”, which you can see in the video after the jump. I’m no music critic, but it’s fascinating to watch as you can see it’s “fingers” moving to open and close the valves on the instrument. Now if they can hook this one up to some other robot-instruments, pretty soon they are all going to be able to play together and have it sound halfway decent. Maybe this one can team up with Toyota’s violin playing robot. Personally, I think the Cantina song from Star Wars would have been more appropriate.

Video after the jump.
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Gibson isn’t the first company to develop a robotic guitar tuning system, but their “Robot Guitar” with its sexy blue sunburst finish is undoubtedly the slickest implementation so far. Not only will the guitar tune itself, it’s also able to switch between a variety of different tuning presets depending on what you want to play. Check it out:

Now, it’s certainly a very cool piece of work, but as a musician, I feel like part of the appeal of playing an instrument is the tuning process itself. I find it rewarding to start out with a discordant sound, and then be able to adjust it into harmoniousness. It’s almost like zen or something. ‘Course, I play the bagpipes, so it’s a bit extreme when they’re out of tune, but I still think my point is, uh, sound. Plus, isn’t it kinda cheating to have any instrument tune itself? It’s one of the fundamentals, right? And odds are if you’re serious enough to manage to get your hands on one of these limited edition guitars, you can probably tune the thing in your sleep.

No price has been mentioned officially that I can find, but rumor has it that the limited edition will be about $2200, and the regular production run will be around $1600.

[ Gibson Robot Guitar ] VIA [ Electronista ]

We’ve all seen our share of musical robots, but Lev is somewhat unique. He’s a pretty accomplished theremin player. And when you think about it, the theremin is the perfect instrument for a musically inclined robot. It’s that eerie sounding instrument you’ve heard a million times in old Sci-Fi and horror B-movies.

Lev’s not new. He’s been performing for years. In 2003 he even played a performance at the Artbots 2003 show in New York. He was built by Ranjit Bhatnagar at Moonmilk Laboratories. The videos are kind of hypnotic. Both are the song “Crazy”. In the first video, it’s Patsy Cline. The second video is Gnarls Barkley, and has Lev accompanied by a robot drummer named Thumpbot, using some unusual objects as drums.

I wonder if Lev and Thumpbot could handle some AC/DC or Led Zeppelin.

Second video and links after the jump.

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By Evan Ackerman

Here it is, nearly midnight, I have like 5 more hours of work, and what did I spend the last 4 minutes and 5 seconds doing? That’s right, gettin’ down and jiggy with a badass robot dance video. The music is catchy, but the little Keepon robot absolutely steals the show with his rhythmic dance moves. Check it out:

This video was sponsored by WIRED after Keepon’s wildly successful (in Japan) music debut, which you can watch here. Oh, and the band in the background is Spoon. Sadly, you can’t buy Keepon, since he’s a research robot, but the designers are working on a similar bot called Roillo who should have similar capabilities and may become commercially available.

[ Keepon BeatBot ] VIA [ Robots-Dreams ]