ERIC SINGER: So, as I said, there's a whole bunch of different kinds of Mod Bots. There are ones with beaters on them, different styles of beaters. Those are all solenoid controlled. Solenoids are mechanical, electromagnetic actuators, so we actuate them through MIDI and a microcontroller, and the microcontroller reads particular MIDI notes, and when the right note comes in for a beater, it will fire a signal to that beater and that will hit the drum.

So, all of our instruments are MIDI and the reason for that of course is that allows anyone who is familiar with MIDI or any MIDI software to use them or compose for them, and for us it's very easy to install and wire them. We're just stringing a whole bunch of MIDI cables all over the place and, you know, everything, MIDI is very robust and easy to use.

We have motor-driven bots which are shakers...,

[ERIC SINGER DEMONSTRATING THE SHAKER BOT]

...Shaker Bots that have a whole bunch of styles of sound making, you know, tambourine sounds and rattles, maraca kind of sounds. We have some motor-driven bells. These are telephone bells but they work kind of like Tibetan singing bowls and they're small, very small.

[ERIC SINGER DEMONSTRATING A BELL BOT]

We have these scrapers that run off of stepper motors, and because I'm walking around, I'm having to actuate them all manually but of course, if I walk through the installation, they will all play.

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

A little more.

GRETCHEN HASSE: That was great.

ERIC SINGER: So, what I just did was start an algorithmic sequence in the program called Max to play the Mod Bots and the Xylobot back, and it's using some randomness plus some pre-scored patterns and creating a -- each time it plays, it creates a new arrangement of percussion music. 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 space and to 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." And he did and through that and future collaborations came up with this whole series of percussive instruments.

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