McBlare: A Robotic Bagpipe Player
Conference Paper, Proceedings of International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME '05), pp. 80 - 84, May, 2005
Abstract
McBlare is a robotic bagpipe player developed by the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. McBlare plays a standard set of bagpipes, using a custom air compressor to supply air and electromechanical “fingers” to control the chanter. McBlare is MIDI controlled, allowing for simple interfacing to a keyboard, computer, or hardware sequencer. The control mechanism exceeds the measured speed of expert human performers. On the other hand, human performers surpass McBlare in their ability to compensate for limitations and imperfections in reeds, and we discuss future enhancements to address these problems. McBlare has been used to perform traditional bagpipe music as well as experimental computer generated music.
BibTeX
@conference{Dannenberg-2005-126610,author = {Roger B. Dannenberg and Ben Brown and Garth Zeglin and Ron Lupish},
title = {McBlare: A Robotic Bagpipe Player},
booktitle = {Proceedings of International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME '05)},
year = {2005},
month = {May},
pages = {80 - 84},
}
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