LEMUR: League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots

GuitarBot: Eric Singer, Kevin Larke, David Bianciardi
!rBot ("chik-r-bot"): Jeff Feddersen, Milena Iossifova,
Michelle Cherian, Brendan J. FitzGerald, Ahmi Wolf
ShivaBot: Kyle Lapidus, Jonathan Huggins, Clay Lacefield
TibetBot: Chad Redmon, Kate Chapman

LEMUR - League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots - is a Brooklyn-based group of artists and technologists developing robotic musical instruments. LEMUR's philosophy is to build robotic instruments that "play themselves." In LEMUR designs, the robots are the instruments. We seek to create machines which intimately integrate the instruments with the robotics.

At ArtBots, LEMUR will present four musical robots. GuitarBot, an electric stringed instrument, is comprised of four independently controllable stringed units which can pick and slide extremely rapidly. It is designed to extend - not simply duplicate - the capabilities of a human guitarist. !rBot (pronounced "chick-r-bot") fuses traditional musical instruments with mechanical design. Inspired by the human mouth, its malleable cavity opens to expose and play a Peruvian goat-hoof rattle. TibetBot is a robotically controlled percussive instrument that creates atonal rhythms and tonal droning soundscapes. It is designed around three Tibetan singing bowls, which are struck by six robotic arms, producing a wide range of timbres. ShivaBot is a four-armed six-foot tall drumming robot, based on the Indian god Shiva and designed around a traditional Indian lap drum. It also accommodates a variety of drums and other percussion instruments, such as bells, chimes and cymbals.

LEMUR was founded in 2000 by Eric Singer as a group of individuals sharing a common interest in robotic musical instruments. LEMUR is made up by artists and technologists with expertise in robotics engineering, instrument design, sculpture, graphic design, performance art, electrical engineering and computer programming.

http://lemurbots.org

Acknowledgements: We would like to thank the Rockefeller Foundation for their generous support of the LEMUR project.