Music For Printers

  I've been lurking on an email list about using Makerbots to play music.  If you're not familiar, Makerbots are 3-D printers that you can put together at home and start printing objects with plastic at home or wherever.  That's their intended purpose anyway.

Some of these lucky Makerbot owners are also making music with them (and talking about doing so on this email list).  They've made it possible to input MIDI files and have the three stepper motors in the Makerbot play individual notes.  A concerto for three Makerbots was premiered at a hackerspace in LA this week.

Back in 1998, two Montreal artists known as [The User] wrote and performed a Symphony For Dot Matrix Printers using 12 printers all sync'ed.  I was lucky enough to get a cd of the recording and fell in love with it.  Their work was more abstract than the Makerbot work I've seen so far.  As far as I know, MIDI notes never came into the picture-- their scores were ASCII files.  It was very rhythmic and abstract.

They wrote a Symphony for Dot Matrix Printers #2 in 1999.  And I was lucky enough to see it performed in Montreal at Mutek in the fall of 2000.  (It was also the first time I ever saw someone play live Gameboy music.)  The setup was 21+ dot matrix printers all on-stage, connected to each other and monitored with video cameras.  Some cameras rode on the printheads, some focused on the paper, but all were being broadcast to a number of large screens overhead which also would display the original ASCII files from the score.  It made for an amazing piece of theater and a wonderful piece of music to hear live, all performed by machines.

(Of course, there's an even longer history of mechanical music that I'm not detailing here, as well: including Antheil's Ballet Mecanique, the work of LEMUR, the Gamelatron and the hundreds of mechanical music machines that live in San Francisco's Musee Mecanique to name a few.)

[The User]'s printers would print the same files that were input; the Makerbots output a physical object different than their code.  In the spirit of Duchamp & Cage, I'd love to see an object that is made with the Makerbot and alongside hear the recording of the audio that makes it.  And vice versa, I'd love to see a MIDI score composed and see what the object Makerbot would build as the result.