[ERIC SINGER DEMONSTRATING THE SLIME-O-TRON]

ERIC SINGER: So, recently I've gotten the itch to get back to my roots and start making some more controllers because I've had this list of ideas piling up for a long time. So, I'm steering the group in that direction for a little while, and as we get new people in, we get a lot of interns, a lot of volunteers and people that are interested in learning the craft of musical robots and electronic music and sensors and all of this stuff. So, I've had a lot of them working on new controllers, and the first in a new series of controllers.

So, we make this distinction between the Bots and the Trons. The Bots are the various robots so Xylobot, Mod Bots, Guitar Bot, etc. and now we have a whole series of instruments called things like the Slime-O-Tron and the Chime-O-Tron and the Slink-O-Tron and many more Trons coming.

The first instrument that is in this new series is called the Slime-O-Tron, and here's the slime, there goes some of the slime, and it makes music using slime. This is, you know, the same kind of slime that you would buy for, you know, that kids get in stores except that we've added something to it to make it conductive, and we built this box based around a controller that I make called MIDI-Tron. I'm sort of obsessed with this Tron idea. MIDI-Tron is a sensor-to-MIDI and MIDI-to-robotics interface. So, we put a MIDI-Tron in here where we created some sensing points. You'll see there's some copper nails in the bottom there, and it senses the conductive slime across the nails, and you play it basically by moving the slime around.

[ERIC SINGER DEMONSTRATING THE SLIME-O-TRON]

GRETCHEN HASSE: That's good.

[ERIC SINGER DEMONSTRATING THE SLIME-O-TRON]

GRETCHEN HASSE: [LAUGHING]

ERIC SINGER: Cool. And then everyone loves playing the Slime-O-Tron. Well, not everybody. Some people are completely creeped out by it. But, you know, most people will get into it because it's, you know, it is deliciously tactile and, you know, it -- Well, that happens sometimes too. You know, it ebbs and flows and --

[ERIC SINGER DEMONSTRATING THE SLIME-O-TRON]

GRETCHEN HASSE: [LAUGHING]

ERIC SINGER: It's not how you typically think about playing an instrument, and that's interesting to me. So, there is no standard technique for playing the Slime-O-Tron. No one teaches. No one gives Slime-O-Tron lessons so everyone has to make it up, and that's what's fun about these.