ERIC SINGER: The reason I got into creating musical robots was one, it was sort of a reaction to my previous works, which was in creating musical controllers, so MIDI controllers mainly to be played by humans and to create synthetic sound. So, you know, these are all input devices to a computer so they -- you're doing something and they're sending data into the computer, and I got to thinking after a while that, you know, the opposite of that would be sending the data out of the computer and using that to control physical devices, and tha led to the idea of robotic musical instruments.

You know also, it was this idea that we could create new kinds of performers, new kinds of performing instruments, acoustically based with all of the chaos and complexity of acoustic sounds, and the, you know --

GRETCHEN HASSE: [LAUGHING] That's actually a great [LAUGHING] synth thing.

[ERIC SINGER ANSWERING HIS MOBILE PHONE]

ERIC SINGER: So, you know, also this idea of creating new kinds of performers, new kinds of instruments that sound different than, you know, synthesized counterparts, so you can synthesize a guitar, you can sample a guitar, but it still comes out of speakers. Now, the Guitar Bot comes out of speakers as well so that's a little bit of a what.

[ERIC SINGER DEMONSTRATING THE GUITAR BOT]

But it's all independent strings, it sounds different than people playing a guitar, and I've never wanted to try to recreate or surpass, you know, try to imitate what humans do on instruments. I don't want to take guitar that, you know, a human plays. I don't want to take a guitar off of the shelf and make a robot to play that. I want to make a robot that's a new kind of guitar. So, all of our instruments really, when we conceive them, we conceive of instruments that are robotic in nature as opposed to creating robots to play existing instruments.

The idea behind the Mod Bots was created by Bill Bowen, one of LEMUR's artists, and his concept behind creating these small percussive instruments was to be able to sonify a space...,

[ERIC SINGER PLAYING A PIECE USING THE MOD BOTS AND THE XYLOBOT]

....go into an architectural space and put instruments really all over the place and create surround sound in the truest sense of the term. He comes from an engineering -- audio engineering background, and he was sort of frustrated with this idea of doing these great mixes of live performances and just still having them come out from a pair of speakers. And when I met him, he saw -- before he was in a group, he saw us demonstrating one of our robots and he said, "Wow, I've been thinking about this exact thing, and how can I get involved? How could I do this stuff?" and I said, "Show up tonight at the shop at 10."

[ERIC SINGER PLAYING A PIECE USING THE MOD BOTS AND THE XYLOBOT]

And he did and through that and future collaborations came up with this whole series of percussive instruments.

The first time that he installed them was in the Angel Orensanz Foundation's Center which is a converted church on the lower east side.

[VIDEO CLIP OF A LEMUR MOD BOTS INSTALLATION AT THE ANGEL ORENSANZ FOUNDATION PLAYING]

And of course, high cathedral ceilings and lots of places to hang things, and Angel is a sculptor and sculpts out of metal, and Bill asked if he could attach beaters and actuators and things to the sculptures, and Angel said, "Sure. Go for it," and so, you know, there's a video on the LEMUR web site, lemurbots.org, where you can see a demonstration of that original Mod Bots installation. And since then, they've been to installations in California, in New York, and they'll be going to Pittsburgh next summer and so they're making their way around.