Barry Werger-Gottesman--Disinhibition for soprano, cello, robot. 19th Annual Ussachevsky Festival

"Disinhibition" (2011) by Barry Werger-Gottesman
Gwendolyn Lytle, soprano
Tom Flaherty, cello
Chakisapa, robot


Inhibitions play a large role in the maintenance of an orderly society, and Disinhibitions explores the gradual relaxation of such restraint... "inhibition" is also a technical term in behavior-based robotics, referring to a technique via which various aspects of the robot's mind vie for control of the robot body. As this inhibition decreases, we see a worsening case of robotic ADD.

The robot in this piece is fully autonomous. Its perceptions, intentions, and emotions all contribute to its musical improvisation, as well as its interaction with its fellow musicians. While the piece has a clear structure and progression, no two performances will look or sound alike.

For the technically-minded: the robot is an ActivMedia Pioneer research robot who perceives the world through vision (Neweton Labs Cognachrome color-blob tracking), a scanning laser rangefinder, eight sonar transducers, and various types of proprioception. His mind is a hybrid, half written in the Ayllu robotic programming environment and running on a Linux netbook, and half written in Max/MSP and running on an iMac. The soprano is all wetware, and the violist is wetware and wood.

Thanks to Tom Flaherty for the most musical parts of the Max patch. This piece is dedicated with love, gratitude, and apologies for being late, to Jim Smith.


----------
Chakisapa was built in 1999, and around the turn of the Milennium performed around the U.S. and Europe in plays including "Fifi and Josie: A Tale of Two Lesbiots" and "The Self-Made Man and the Moon". He has participated in RoboCup international robotic soccer competition and as various AAAI robotic challenges. He has also contributed to research projects for NASA, the NSF, DARPA, and ONR. After a hiatus of some five years, Chakisapa has recently undergone a thorough rejuvenation and upgrading, and with his brother Ullanta the Robot Levin is one of the founding members of the new and secretive Musical Robotics Laboratory.

Barry Werger-Gottesman has been developing and presenting robotic performace art pieces since 1995, and has toured worldwide with his robotic theater troupe Ullanta Performance Robotics. He has won awards in numerous international robotic competitions and research projects, and has worked in robotic research and development for NASA, DARPA, NSF, ONR, and many companies that develop research robots and their associated software. He developed the Ayllu distributed robotic programming environment, MARS/L for Pioneer, and the PAI robotic library, which are used in numerous research institutions. After a few years of detoxing from government robotics projects, Barry is finally making progress in his nefarious plan to unite the musical and robotic aspects of his life.

Category:

Music

Tags:

• ussachevsky
• robot
• cello
• soprano
• disinhibition
• barry
• werger
• gottesman