Musician Nigel Stanford doesn’t just play alongside his bandmates for the album “Automatica”. He programmed them.
Stanford spent a month in his garage teaching mechanical arms to work piano keys, wield guitar picks and drumsticks and press percussion foot pedals. He taught them well.
The head-banging bots are so confident, that by the end of the video for the album’s title song, they rebel against their human collaborator, tossing and smashing their instruments and firing lasers to bring down the warehouse where they’re rocking the electronica.
Stanford, a lifelong musician born and raised in New Zealand, has long been fascinated by the intersection of music and science. The robots in the video come from Kuka Robotics, a Germany-based manufacturer of industrial robotic systems. But he insisted on doing all the engineering himself.
