We spoke with Dr Will McGenn to find out how this set of instruments came into being.
“It started initially when Professor Danielle George did the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures in 2014. Their big finale was to have a robot orchestra.
“The robots for that came together from various research groups and universities, so it wasn’t something that could be kept together – lots of it was actual research hardware and things like that. It had to go back after it was finished. In 2016, Manchester was European City of Science, and that was when the Robot Orchestra really started up in its current form. Initially it was meant as a one-off thing – just for one performance, which we did at the Museum of Science and Industry.
“We played quite a lot of songs with human musicians that day, and since then it’s just snowballed. People have been grabbed by it and are really keen. People keep on writing to us: ‘come to our event’; ‘can we do stuff with you?’; ‘can you do this?’. Now it’s just trying to work out how to keep it going, without it still being so intensive from a time commitments [aspect for] volunteering on this.
“We’ve got a team of Masters students working on this Orchestra this year. They’re building a new core of the Orchestra – a new conductor, and a few new instruments and the improvements that’s going to provide will make the Orchestra so much easier to use, and we’ll be able to pass it out to more people. More people will be able to take it out on the road to events like this. Hopefully that will start a whole new cycle of getting kids building new instruments.
“[You program the instruments in] quite a few different ways. We’ve got robots based around quite a lot of different controllers. We’ve got some with Raspberry Pis, some with Arduinos, some that use the little Crumble controllers, which are really simple things based on the Arduino. The Raspberry Pis and Arduinos can take a MIDI file, so a little bit of manipulation to it and [you can] program it onto the Arduino or the Pi. The Crumbles are a lot simpler, so they’re controlled a lot more from our robot conductor. Each time they are needed to play, the conductor will send them a signal.
“When the Orchestra started a couple of years ago, one of the big themes we wanted was reusing, recycling, upcycling. Pretty much all the instruments have been made by school kids – both primary school and secondary school. We’ve got a couple made by university students, but pretty much everything else was made by school kids.
“We’re on social media – just search for ‘robot orchestra manchester’. We put pictures up; we’ve got lots of videos of the different songs as well.”
