Robot Symphony - Getting Started

Finding Our Place in a Robotic Symphony

      This week marked the start of our 10-week journey. Over the course of this journey, we will create a fully functioning automated instrument of our choosing, that will participate in a robot symphony through the power of MIDI.

      A Little Clarification--

      "We," refers to our group's four members: Korede Aderele, Nitish Gupta, Donovan Kelly, and Christopher Uzokwe -- freshman engineers at Drexel University. In depth profiles will be provided in a later post.

      The Robot Symphony is an freshman engineering design section where multiple project teams will design and construct advanced robotic musical instruments. The robotic instruments (designed with Arduino-based microcontrollers) will be a part of a theatrically staged presentation at the end of the term. Each instrument will use mechanical actuation and movement to produce sound. Here is a link to last year's performance, which we plan to outperform.

     MIDI, or Musical Instrument Digital Interface, is a protocol developed in the 1980s that allows for the communication of multiple electronic instruments in the sending, receiving, and playing of any given note. MIDI is beneficial to us because:
             

Its compact -an entire song can be stored within a few hundred MIDI messages (compared to audio data which is sampled thousands of times a second)

easy to modify/manipulate notes -change pitch, duration, and other parameters without having to rerecord

change instruments - MIDI only describes which notes to play, and you can send these notes to any instrument to change the overall sound of the composition. (What is MIDI?, 1)

                                                   

A typical MIDI interface -the keyboards notes are being translated to the program above.

Our Project Ideas

Currently, our group is torn between two project ideas. The ideas have their own pros and cons in terms of simplicity vs. final product, and can be seen below.

By the end of this week, we will have decided on one project, and will be ready to move forward. In the meantime, our class must still decide on a song to put together. Any suggestions?

Works Cited

Amandaghassaei. "What Is MIDI?" Instructables.com. Instructables, 12 May 2016. Web. 12 Apr. 2017. <http://www.instructables.com/id/What-is-MIDI/>.