The Solar Robotic Instruments were created By Chris Cerrito and Mike Rosenthal as an answer to some simple questions: could we make solar musical instruments? what would they look like? what would they sound like? The result is a series of musical instruments that each utilize the same underlying technology, while acting and sounding uniquely different from each other.

Solar Robot Performance @ ITP NIME Concert December 2008 from mike rosenthal on Vimeo.

PLATEBOT: This is a metal plate from Ikea, with a miller engine, some solar panels, and a bunch of rattly bits to make noise. The motor spins around and makes the whole plate wobble about, providing some really nice percussion sounds.

PONTOONBOT: Chris developed these guys based on a dream he had. They are comprised of a Miller Engine, a single solar cell, and a pair of pager motors mounted into pontoons. The design is really nice and compact, and the motion is erratic and self defeating. They kinda just stay in one place and jitter around.

XYLOBOT: These might be my favorites. They look like a clock, but are actually circular xylophones with the tiles mounted on magnets that can be moved around on the metal face to be struck in the order of our choosing. This creates an extremely flexible melody instrument, which is something we were really interested in developing.

PAPERBOT and THRUMBOT: These were the first bots we prototyped. Basically it is a piece of butcher block paper 6′ tall with a motor and erratic mounted at the top. The spinning erratic vibrates the paper (or sheet metal) and creates a beautiful drone sound. Simple but extremely effective.

WOBBLE TABLES: The wobble tables are each a 12″ square piece of plexi mounted to a base station with springs. There is a motor attached to the underneath surface of the plexi and then controlled by a series of switches that dictate how fast the motor spins around and wobbles the table. We then drop various beans and ball bearings on the plexi and listen to them jump around.

TECHNICAL DETAILS: All of our instruments are based on the BEAMBOTs and in particular are using the Miller Engine. We were fascinated with the simplicity and elegance of the BEAMBOTs and after building a couple we got to wondering what it would be like to put that principle to work towards making music. So we built a Miller Engine and had boards printed. At that point, we just had to hook solar cells up to one end, and a low amperage motor to the other. Very flexible for fast prototyping and experimentation.