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Lego techno
Beck’s and Shine just launched some pretty cool Playable Posters to celebrate the start of NZ Music Month. And if you liked that musical contraption, then check out Play House, a ridiculously complex music maker made of Lego Technic.
Alex Allmont, who Wired calls “a full-time coder, a part-time Ph.D. in polyrhythmic music, and a long-time Lego fan”, combined these different loves to create the contraption.
Play House, as he calls it, was built for AudioGraft, an experimental music festival in Oxford, England. Spread out across a small tabletop, the assembly triggers sampled drums and digital notes based on those of the Roland TB303, the synthesizer whose belching bass gave rise to acid house in the ’80s. (The machine, Allmont tells us, is not concerned with “the white-gloves-and-whistles sort of acid house, but the more spatial stuff, inspired by artists like Plastikman and Basic Channel.” Glad we cleared that up!)
What’s next? Muscles that play music? Pull the other one.
