As anyone who’s been to Chuck E Cheese’s knows, robotic bands have been under development for years. Patrick Flanagan’s cyborg percussion ensemble, Jazari seems to take things to a new level.

As Patrick describes it, Jazari “fuses African rhythms,
algorithmic composition, computer music, and electro-mechanics into
beat-driven steamfunk.”  The controls are quite unique as well.  Originally, the controller was simply a Wiimote. This was limited, since one needs three fingers to hold on to it, so a new “springbok” device was born allowing all five fingers to be used to play music.  The vocal part of the music is created using an Android program called “voloco”.

The video after the break should explain everything a little better, and the music itself is pretty cool.  Patrick will be doing more programming and hardware work over the summer rather than touring much, but “they” should give an awesome concert once all the bugs are worked out.

Want to make your own band with obsolete technology? Click through for a few pointers to get you started.

Scanners used to be the hot peripherals of their day; now many are reduced to collecting dust. Revive these relics and put them to good use as instruments.

In the Radiohead video we saw an array of hard drives used as speakers. Afrotechmod created the video above featuring the Star Wars theme. He wired the audio input directly to the coils used to control head and platter motion. Since all hard drives are different it may take a little poking around to get the desired effect.

Dot matrix printers are well known for their iconic sounds. In the above video, [Sue Harding] tells us about her experiences with them and how she plays around with color and character density to create new sounds.

Lastly, we have the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. While it’s not entirely clear what program is being used, there are quite a few audio trackers available for the platform. The video above is a ZX Spectrum demo made by Digital Reality.

[via Waxy]