The Guitarist Is Metal. No, Not Heavy Metal.
By MICHAEL BECKERMAN
Published: November 30, 2004
 fter
the violinist Mari Kimura's concert at Symphony Space last week, I went
to Starbucks with the composer J. Brendan Adamson, the inventor Eric
Singer and a "friend" who had played in the concert.
"What's that?" asked the woman behind the counter, looking at the friend. "A robot," I said with the sense of cool that comes only when you accompany a robot to Starbucks.
"What
does it do?" she continued, awestruck, since if truth be told, the bot
looks something like a blocking dummy on a football field. "It plays music," I said smugly. Our
companion, GuitarBot, might have been pleased, but it wasn't connected.
And besides, none of its circuits are wasted on pride. "We
weren't interested in making robots that played musical instruments,"
said Mr. Singer, of Lemur (League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots),
in the subsequent conversation. "We wanted robots that were musical
instruments." GuitarBot will appear again tonight - thrilling the
audience as four moving bridges zing up and down its four strings like
in a racehorse game at a carnival - in a concert by Mr. Adamson at the
Juilliard School. "Robo Recital," it is billed. "No Human Performers." This
kind of "posthuman" hype creates everything from shivers of delight
(Robots, how neat!) to shivers of fear (What? They don't need us humans
anymore?), which have been part of the response to robots since they
first appeared in fiction at the beginning of the last century. The
delight is richly nuanced: thousands of Web sites tout an array of
products like robot pets and robot household servants. You can even
rent a robot to make presentations at your next business meeting. The
current Sharper Image catalog leads with a classic illustration of the
two main types of robots: a humanoid one, which amuses because it does
"human" things like grunt and burp, and a household robot vacuum
cleaner, which roams self-propelled through your house, picking up
dust. A furniture store in SoHo boasts a huge assortment of brightly
colored tin robots made in China. And few human characters in recent years have brought more chuckles than the robot duo from "Star Wars." Then
there is the dark side of robots, which first appeared in the play that
gave them their name, Karel Capek's "R.U.R." (Rossum's Universal
Robots). The work, first performed in 1921, deals with a robot factory
run amok, much the same plot as in the recent film "I, Robot," based
loosely on a book by Isaac Asimov. In these cases, some glitch occurs,
a humanlike "ghost in the machine," and all the protections programmed
into the mechanical creatures go out the window. In "I, Robot,"
the mechanisms' stomachs suddenly turned red (indigestion?), and they
started throwing people around like popcorn. The message is clear: like
the golem, an earlier nonmechanical creature made flesh, a robot can
help you, but it can also hurt you. GuitarBot claims its ancestor
not in the golem - which, after all, has decidedly human
characteristics - but in the ingenious automated machines of the last
three centuries. In the mid-18th century, the Maillardet brothers
created an astonishing writer-draftsman that could write poetry and do
amazing drawings of ships and buildings. Around the same time, Jacques
de Vaucanson created his famous defecating duck, which could eat,
digest and all the rest. He also created a flute-playing android, which
offered 12 tunes, perhaps an ancestor of the robot that recently
conducted Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in Tokyo. While audiences may be
titillated by the prospect of seeing such devices and their descendants
do "human" things, Mr. Singer and Mr. Adamson have something else in
mind. Mr. Adamson, in particular, is more concerned with technical
issues and the ability of machines to do things that humans cannot
accomplish. The flier for his concert prominently displays a
quote from the visionary Australian composer Percy Grainger: "Too long
has music been subject to the limitations of the human hand and subject
to the interfering interpretation of a middle-man: the performer. A
composer wants to speak to his public direct."
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