The concept of robots that play music — let alone ones that do so on stage and in perfect time — is alien to the population at large. So it’s not uncommon for Eric Singer, the founder of the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots (LEMUR), to raise eyebrows when describing his creations.
“I was once asked, ‘What does a musical robot sound like?’ and I said, ‘That’s kind of like asking, ‘What does a piano sound like?’” he says from his headquarters in Pittsburgh. “It entirely depends on who’s playing it and who’s performing.”
Even though the notion of instrumental robots can feel ahead of its time, a quick trip to YouTube easily dispels any disbelief. A search of “Pat Metheny” and “LEMUR” pulls up a seven-minute video in which Metheny, a jazz-fusion composer, plays guitar and is accompanied by an orchestra of LEMUR bots — automated arms, levers, and gears that can command a small army of accompanying instruments.
The performance is intuitive and seamless, and it’s hard to believe that living, breathing musicians are not playing it. “I didn’t know quite what to expect when I started this whole thing, especially making a record with it,” Metheny says during the video, referencing his newest album, Orchestrion. “The result is absolutely nothing like what I would have imagined.”
Singer formed LEMUR in 2000, but he has tinkered with computers and robotics since attending Carnegie Mellon University, where he graduated in 1988 as a computer-engineering major. While at Boston’s Berklee College of Music over the next few years, he discovered the school’s music-synthesis department and started taking serious strides in fusing his interest in technology and music.
“I had been a musician for most of my life, so I always had this left-brain, right-brain fight, knowing that I would never sort of be happy just doing one or the other,” Singer says. New-wave artists like They Might Be Giants and XTC heavily influenced his work, and the growing role that electronics played in music creation spurred him to keep pushing the envelope. “Back in the late ’80s and early ’90s, it was sort of a difficult thing to do compared to today,” Singer says. “We didn’t have microprocessors or development kits or things like that, so my first instruments were hooked up to Apple II computers.”
During his years in grad school at New York University in the mid-’90s, he started incorporating what he was learning in the classroom into the music that he was creating. His growing interest in artificial intelligence also had a major impact on the direction of his future career.
“We had this [CGI] saxophone player created in the lab that I was working at, and we wanted to make him improvise along to the music,” Singer says. “We would send him information about what the piano player was playing, and he would create a saxophone improvisation based on that. Bear in mind that NYU’s computer-science program really has nothing to do with music, but I was able to see the connections between techniques in computer science that could be purposed in music.”
Singer had made instruments that produced computerized sound for nearly a decade before he decided to find ways to incorporate acoustic instruments into the mix.
“I thought one day, ‘If I reverse the equation and have a computer do the talking, that could go out to real instruments,” he says. Soon enough, he started brainstorming with colleagues, and the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots was born. Contrary to the images that thoughts of a musical robot can conjure, LEMUR bots often look and sound just like regular instruments that are simply guided by MIDI software and computer programming.
“One of the philosophies of the group is to create instruments that are robotic as opposed to adding robots to existing instruments,” Singer says. “It’s given the same kind of control over acoustic instruments that musicians have enjoyed for a long time over electronic sounds, and acoustic instruments have particular advantages over synthesizer sounds. They sound, in general, just more rich and live.”
Over the years, musicians such as contemporary composer Todd Reynolds, experimental violinist Mari Kimura, and electronic pioneer Morton Subotnick have created music utilizing LEMUR, and Singer’s observations of their compositional styles has informed the evolution of his project. “It’s my job as a creator to make my instruments as easy to use and as intuitive to use as possible,” he says, “and that has frankly taken a long time — several iterations and interfaces on the robots themselves. I’ve learned a lot from watching the composers work and what it takes to work seamlessly with the instruments.”
In terms of selecting musicians for collaboration, Singer tends to be open to different genres, and it’s not uncommon for musicians to approach him with ideas. In Metheny’s case, he commissioned Singer to create custom LEMUR instruments that would accompany him on a Spring 2010 tour and essentially act as his backup band. “In his show, he comes out playing a live acoustic guitar for a few songs, and then he plays a song with one robot,” Singer says. “Then he lifts the curtain up and unveils the orchestra that is about 60 instruments, and about 45 were created by us.”
Singer also took his act on the road during his first (of many) collaborations with Reynolds, a former member of Bang on a Can as well as Steve Reich and Musicians. In 2008, Reynolds toured with LEMUR and Singer through Poland, where Reynolds was so dedicated to the project that he would compose pieces throughout dress rehearsals and then play them live later the same night.
“I spend a lot of time staring at a computer screen producing and creating,” Reynolds says, “and onstage interacting with scenarios that I have set up in the laptop. My journey in the electronic music world has involved creating a hybrid, augmented instrument built out of old and new technology, so considering another set of instruments [that] were also hybrids was a no-brainer—and very compelling.”
This past May, Singer and Reynolds collaborated again for two shows, one at Joe’s Pub in New York City and another with the Albany Symphony Orchestra’s chamber group, Dogs of Desire, at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center in Troy, New York. “I think that his style is very well suited to work with the robots,” Singer says of Reynolds, “and he does a lot of improvisation with the robots and the instruments. That, to me, is a really good thing and a driving force for what can be done with the instruments.”
Kimura, a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, is another musician who has taken an improvisational approach with LEMUR. She originally teamed up with Singer in 2003 while she was in New York City. After seeing a demo of his guitar bot, she knew that she had to do a duet with it. “I enjoy a certain randomization with limits so that ‘we’ can both be facing the same direction, but not necessarily taking the same road every time,” Kimura says. “[The project] certainly does have an enormous influence on my compositional process.”
A personal milestone in Singer’s career occurred in 2007, when he was able to perform with his idols They Might Be Giants and other luminaries like Subotnick, jazz trombonist George Lewis, and unclassifiable composer JG Thirlwell during Robosonic Eclectic: Live Music by Robots and Humans — a concert that included everything from laptop performances to a stringed LEMUR ensemble. “I decided to have a string quartet in my composition,” Thirlwell says of his contribution to the evening. “I enjoyed working with the guitar bot sitting right next to me, as all its mechanics are quite squeaky and percussive. I started getting used to its idiosyncrasies. It starts to feel human.”
For Singer, the concert was an opportunity to see the multitude of ways that technology could be used by musicians of completely different genres, allowing them to branch out into new creative territories. “There are always ways of simulating what real instruments sound like,” Singer says. “But the robots — I never say that they play better or worse than humans. They just play differently, so it puts a new tool into composers’ hands and is one that he or she can play with and experiment with until their heart’s content.”
Aside from its music applications, LEMUR also has lent itself to a number of art installations, including at the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh and the Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Garden in Staten Island, New York. The LEMUR installations often take on an interactive approach and invite viewers to intermingle with the robots via video projections and motion sensors. “A typical reaction is [that] you see a projection of billiard balls on the floor, and you walk in and start kicking the balls around,” Singer says. “And every time they collide, a corresponding pair of robots play or a percussion sounds. It’s a very integrated, very interactive sound video and robotic experience and is very unique among the field.”
In addition to his work with LEMUR, Singer has delved further into algorithmic composition, which allows music to be generated by a computer based upon specific equations or set parameters. One of Singer’s projects allows a computer to take pieces written by Johann Sebastian Bach, analyze them, and reconstruct modern interpretations of Bach’s work. “I wouldn’t purport that they necessarily write anything that accurately sounds like him or is as good in his style, but they are creating something new based on a composer from the past,” he says.
Singer’s creations are an indication of the future high-tech leaps that will be made within the industry. Though his work may spark discussion about technology’s growing impact on the music, Singer considers LEMUR’s progressions to be nothing out of the ordinary.
“To me, it is just as society has done for thousands and thousands of years: create new ways to make music,” Singer says. “And musicians have generally embraced those, almost universally. With musical robots, I have had people say, ‘What’s this going to do to real musicians?’ And I say, ‘Well, I’m a real musician, and so are the people who create music for them and perform with them.’ So there you go; it’s real musicians making real music on real instruments.”