Building and playing a robot slide whistle orchestrion
Mitxela.com features building an automated slide whistle orchestrion.
When I built the first robot slide whistle, the plan was always to build a quartet of them, if time and budget had permitted. EMF 2022 was the perfect deadline to try and make it a reality. I submitted the idea as an installation, and got the thumbs up over a month before the event, but due to other commitments I couldn’t actually start building this until two weeks before.
I also gave a talk at the event (originally it was going to be two talks…) which meant I definitely over-committed myself. With the stress of trying to get the installation working, I ended up writing the talk on the morning I was supposed to give it, which was much less than ideal.
The orchestrion ran continuously for three days. I spent most of that time worrying about why it wasn’t quite in tune and whether it was going to break at any moment. We set up a “jukebox” laptop with a bunch of MIDI files on it and a curses-based text-user-interface. The MIDI keyboard also allowed people to play it in real time.
Arranging music for the slide whistles is quite labour-intensive. The page for the original robot slide whistle goes into some detail about this, with the limited articulation, enforced portamento, and 1½ octave range.
Check out the video below and more in the detailed post here.
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