McBlare, the Robot Bagpipe

Posted 27 Jun 2006 at 21:45 UTC by steve

Roland Piquepaille writes, "Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) have built a robot bagpiper which is controlled by a computer that has many traditional bagpipe tunes in its memory. This robotic player "can also add authentic sounding ornaments to simple melodies entered through a piano-like keyboard and play the result on the bagpipes." To read more (and here a sample MP3 file) of Roger Dannenberg's robot bagpipe, take a look at Roland's blog or check out the original Scotsman article which begins, "It is enough to make traditional Scottish bagpipe aficionados choke on their chanters and mutter darkly that it could only happen in America.".