Making Music with Machines, A-Term, 2023

Members: Thomas Piccione, Michael Cappadona

This is RoboDrum. It is entirely autonomous and programmable via Arduino and Ableton Live.

A huge part of this machine is the visual aspect. All the sticks are of varying length to produce different tones by hitting different spots of the drum, just as a real drummer would.

The best example of a similar type of instrument is EMMI’s MADI, which also uses a variety of different striking elements placed around the top surface of a snare drum. However, MADI is significantly less integrated to the drum than RoboDrum, and does not have as much visual movement. Our goal with RoboDrum was to make it more visually interesting as well as being able to attach simply to any drum. In our case, we made it to work with a snare drum, but the design could be modified to work with different sized drums.