June 14th-July 13th, 10am-5pm,
Palm House, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh. Entry Free.

EXTENDED FOR FURTHER TWO WEEKS DUE TO POPULAR DEMAND! See review in Scotsman.

Meet the artists: June 28th, 3pm, at the Palm House.

A composition for plants, yangqin, bamboo robot and robotic chimes, Three Pieces is designed as a collaboration between robots, traditional instruments, and living things, housed in Victorian Palm House of the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh. A traditional Chinese dulcimer is played by a robot with many bamboo fingers while the surrounding foliage hides an ensemble of robotic chimes. Despite being separate individuals, the robots communicate and perform together. The robot performers are conducted by all the living things in the Palm House. The moisture content of the soil changes slowly as the plants absorb water, while on a much faster timescale, the temperature changes in the building as animals, including humans, move about. The installation detects this living presence in the Palm House and the music changes accordingly. The robots react to humans, but their mood alters with the plants.

The installation uses custom built hardware based on two Arduino microcontrollers, taking input from 2 infra-red sensors monitoring motion within the Palm House, and a soil moisture probe. Software on the microcontrollers plays music composed for the installation that reacts to the presence of humans and changes in the soil of the plant beds. The music is performed by 13 robots made up of an ensemble of simple tuned chimes and a large traditional yangqin which has been fitted with 10 robotic bamboo beaters.

The sum of all these parts is a strange combination of traditional and modern, organic and electronic, nature and artifice. Despite being composed in advance, the music will never be exactly the same twice, in part because it will change in response to the environment and audience, and also because the robots are a combination of accurately machined parts (e.g. mechanical solenoids) and natural materials (e.g. bamboo canes).

Come along to the Botanics to see the installation in action during June as part of Dialogues of Wind and Bamboo. In the meantime, here are some photos of the robots being built…

Here’s our venue… the Temperate Palm House in the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh:

And finally, a video of the same piece as the one at the top, when the installation was still under development: